


inside my wounded soul (like mortal love)

by kimaracretak



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Astrology, Character Death Fix, Childhood Memories, Colour Symbolism, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/F, F/M, First Kiss, Force Bond (Star Wars), Force Visions, Gender-Questioning Character, Holding Hands, Jakku, Old Republic Lore (frantically shoves eldritch plot bunnies under the bed), Post-TLJ, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-24
Updated: 2018-02-24
Packaged: 2019-03-07 17:38:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 13
Words: 22,861
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13439844
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kimaracretak/pseuds/kimaracretak
Summary: Or maybe, Rey thinks, blinking against another flood of images — young Ben balancing on tiptoes on a stool, braiding his mother's hair; young Ben running up theFalcon's ramp to hug his father; slightly older Ben in what must have been his mother's Senate office, sitting at a side table with Amilyn and pointing something out on a datapad — maybeshe's the one who's no longer quite there. Maybe some echo of the breaking has reverberated down through her choice and Ben's and flung them into this new nowhere.*Conversations on history, memory, the Force, and what it means to be alone in your own head.*Or: Ben makes a different choice in the throne room, and the ride down to Crait is very,verylong.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [itslaurenmae](https://archiveofourown.org/users/itslaurenmae/gifts).



> The prompt was: _Force Bond: Showing each other memories from their childhoods_. Things may have ... spiralled _massively_ out of control, and what was supposed to be a series of short conversations turned into an epic.
> 
> My betas: My darling betas, I don't think I can name you without breaking anonymity right now, but you know who you are, and whether you read a paragraph or a section or the whole damn thing, you are why this fic is good (if you don't think it's good, then I am why it's bad). Everyone, give them love post-author reveals when I put their names up.
> 
> Title from Leaves' Eyes, 'Symphony of the Night'

Tell me when the night is gone,  
Like washed away,  
Make a wish beneath the mourning star.  
— Kamelot, "Mourning Star"

The _Millennium Falcon_ 's cockpit has never been a truly comfortable place, but right now, limping towards Crait with Ben Solo in her copilot's seat and Chewbacca holding the crumpled, bloody form of a strange woman in the seat behind her, Rey thinks it's reached a level of discomfort she hadn't known was possible.

Neither of them have spoken aloud since they left the _Supremacy_ , not beyond Rey yelling for him to move, _move_ when he stopped to sift through a pile of wreckage in a frantic blur of Force and dark-gloved hands and emerged with the half-dead woman in his arms. In the moment she hadn't thought beyond the fact that the woman wasn't wearing a First Order uniform — at least, not as far as she could tell under the blood — and they needed to leave, but with the prospect of several hours between them and (hopefully) the rest of the Resistance on the planet, she can't help the curiosity.

It reminds her too much of fleeing Jakku with Finn, the frantic knot of _everything has changed and I do not know how_ creeping cold up her throat.

They hadn't needed to speak, at first, dodging shots from the remaining First Order ships and returning fire as best they could. Rey's lips flatten in a thin, satisfied smile as she remembers sending the _Falcon_ into a roll pitched steep enough to make Chewie wail softly while one of the remaining ships on her radar blinked into three pieces.

They fight better together than they ever could fight against each other, and Rey doesn't need words to know that Ben, at least, would fight anyone who dared to challenge that. One day, she might even wonder at her certainty that she would join him.

But the _Falcon_ had shuddered with a lucky hit on the far end of the Order's range, and the scream of something in the drive core dying still echoes in Rey's ears long after the Order ships had regrouped for a retreat.

Patching the drive had required more conversation, but somehow not as much as Rey had expected. Here, too, there is an odd synchronicity, and Rey's stomach flips unhappily at the thought that, at one point, Ben might have known the _Falcon_ as well as Han did. Does that make her an intruder, in the ship that felt like it leapt to obey her as quickly as —

Rey goes back to studying the sleeping woman in Chewie's arms, suddenly unwilling to entertain any more thoughts of Ben and _obedience_ just then.

"Who is she?" Rey finally asks, when the silence of the vacuum outside has spread far enough between them to be uncomfortable.

"Amilyn," he says, as if the name is more than an answer on its own. "She was ... is. She deserves more than anything that will happen to her on that ship. Even if she is Resistance."

It doesn't do much to ease the cold, but it is enough for now. _I knew you would turn._ It feels, almost, more like proof than the fact that he took her hand amidst the bodies.

"Why her? Why —" But she doesn't need to ask, the half-question dying on her lips, because it's _there_ , in front of her, as clear as Ben next to her fire on Ahch-To: Amilyn and Leia, younger but unmistakable, wrapped around each other on a couch while a small child with mischievous eyes studiously plaits Amilyn's teal curls into Leia's fraying brown braid.

"She was always around, when I was little." Rey blinks, and the vision dissipates. His eyes remain, though: so much the same and yet infinitely sadder.

Jealousy flares hot in Rey's chest at the thought that Ben had three parents, three parents and an uncle, and —

"What happened to letting the past die?"

— and they weren't enough, or he wouldn't be here with her now, and the flame dies almost as soon as it sparks.

She regrets the words just as quickly too, impulsive biting things with the sting of _you're nothing_ that she doesn't want either of them to face again.

He feels the jealousy more, though, flinches away to busy himself with the nav computer as he draws a curtain across the bond that still lingers, and the loss of his closeness stings.

"Sorry," she offers after a moment. She doesn't meet his eyes.

His shoulders relax, the curtain thins. "It's different now." _You made things different_.

 _I know. I know_ you. "Would you ... would tell me about her?"

She can see the calculations on his face as he works through them, weighs secrets and history and pain against everything they are now and everything ahead. "I don't know. She ... I haven't talked about her in ..." He sighs, spins around to cradle Amilyn's hand in his own.

Three of her fingers are definitely broken, and her wrist is a mess of flesh and cloth and metal that might once have been bracelets. Against the black of Ben's gloves she looks pale beyond what the injuries would account for, like she's not quite _there_.

Or maybe, Rey thinks, blinking against another flood of images — young Ben balancing on tiptoes on a stool, braiding his mother's hair; young Ben running up the _Falcon_ 's ramp to hug his father; slightly older Ben in what must have been his mother's Senate office, sitting at a side table with Amilyn and pointing something out on a datapad — maybe _she_ 's the one who's no longer quite there. Maybe some echo of the breaking has reverberated down through her choice and Ben's and flung them into this new nowhere.

"Ben," she says softly. "Ben, what are you — when was —"

He looks up, startled. "You saw?"

"Yeah," Rey says, unsure if she should apologise for this as well. They hadn't had control over their connection before, and she isn't sure they truly do now, but something about how clearly not-now these images are makes her think he's meant for her to see them.

(Or something else does, the part of her mind so used to planning for the worst reminds her. But Snoke is dead, at Ben's hand, and Luke isn't here, and there's nothing else in the galaxy that could do this.

Probably. She knows too well the hunger of the shadows and the things they shelter, and the dark spaces in the galaxy hold more than she ever knew or dreamed of on Jakku. Knows, from Ahch-To, that the Force casts shadows too, and that it's shadows are unsettlingly _alive_.)

And Ben ... _smiles_. Tremulous and small and _genuine_ , and it lifts Rey's heart. "I knew it wasn't him," he says. "Just like I knew it wasn't you projecting, the very first time. This is how we're meant to be."

"Meant to be," she echoes with a sigh. "I wanted you here, Ben, I didn't want —"

"I can show you Amilyn," he interrupts, eyes alight with the thrill of a new discovery. "No need to talk. Just ... close your eyes."

A week ago she would have laughed in his face at the thought that she would willingly be vulnerable in any way so close to him. Now, he's offering his own vulnerability in turn, and it feels like the most natural thing possible to let her eyes drift shut, to breathe deep of the scent of oil and metal and burning and _life_ filling the cockpit, and let the blackness behind her eyelids slowly give way to one of the things Ben wants to share with her.


	2. Chapter 2

Midnight,  
Come to me now.  
Midnight,  
Again today I'm falling into you.  
— Dreamcatcher, "Sleepwalking"

Light returns slowly, pale pinpricks sparkling into being even before she's properly sure she's opened her eyes again. It takes her a moment longer to see the stars for what they are, scattered around one moon.

The stars are unfamiliar, neither Jakku's nor any she recognises from the flight sims. It's disorienting, looking _up_ at stars that aren't her own, even more so when she realises the blue-tinged moon is alone in the sky. Even after Ahch-To, the single moon still seems _wrong_.

"Chandrila," Ben says softly, voice thick with an emotion Rey can't put a name to. "This is where I ... where I was born."

Rey kicks experimentally at the ground, watches a plume of dirt rise. Vision or memory, some part of this world knows she's here. As the rest of her senses adjust, she takes in her surroundings: a forest not unlike Takodana except in age, gnarled flowered trees reaching for the sky at the edges of the clearing, and, sand and stars, was _everything_ in the galaxy so alive? How much easier was it for them to grow with so many examples to follow, so much history that did not need to be prised back piece by piece from the sands?

Maybe they just grew up differently, history in their blood instead of under their feet.

Maybe that was how you grew up _alive_.

"There's Jakku." Ben's voice pulls her from her thoughts and she follows the dim outline of his arm to a small red dot southwest of the moon. Rey bites her lip against a sudden wave of nostalgia as she tries to figure out if he's right. "You're not there yet, of course, but the Sith are, and they've brought with them artifacts beyond anything you've imagined."

_Artifacts I've scavenged_ , Rey thinks sourly, remembering one of the old etched charts she'd pulled from the Observatory and that very clearly had the galactic core between Jakku and Chandrila.

"Asshole." She reaches out instinctively, ready to land a friendly punch on his shoulder like she would whenever Ivano Troade would call her by one of his infinite awful nicknames.

But she stops at the last moment, fist frozen in midair, because this is _Ben_ , not another scavenger, not even quite a friend, and she can't do this, even in jest.

He's not even looking at her, eyes still fixed to the sky. "Ben's — my — birth chart. Was from here." He turns around, and Rey quickly drops her hand back to her side, but he's staring past her like she's hardly even there. "There were others, I think, but Amilyn said the Chandrilan one was the most promising. Something about the temporary moons."

"Are they — is she —?" Ben had brought her here for a reason, she reminds herself, even if he didn't know exactly how. She owes him little, but this she can give: her presence here, her witness to a woman maybe fading.

"Yeah." He spins around slowly, reorienting himself in this once-familiar place. "There. By the fire."

And there is a fire, now she knows to look for it. There's a faint air of _not quite_ clinging to it, too, and Rey realises it must be an artifact of the bond, as well of Chandrila's sheer _difference_. There's a fire, light and cheerful and it, too is seemingly alive, just as much as the three humans clustered around it.

Rey takes a cautious step forward, and her footstep makes no sound at all on the leaves and grass. So it is a memory, then, something to see and not touch.

It feels almost disappointing, yet it emboldens her to step forwards, one foot in front of the other with Ben trailing behind her a much more reluctant ghost, until she reaches the other edge of the clearing and settles herself by the fire. One of the figures is Amilyn, just as Ben had said, and Rey isn't at all surprised to see that the others are Leia, most of her hair flowing freely over her shoulders as she nestles into Amilyn's side, and Ben, a giggling toddler sprawled across both their laps.

_Always around_ , Ben had said, and for all the affection those two words had held in the face of an improbable number of years denied, somehow Rey hadn't expected how _easy_ that affection would seem.

"Thank you, Amilyn," Leia is saying softly, her words nevertheless audible over the cheerful sound of the small spinning toy Ben is determinedly trying to smack her nose with. "I didn't think we could face another night alone in that house. It's so ..."

"Dark," Amilyn says, finishing Leia's sentence as if it's the most natural thing in the world. "You and Ben need time with the stars too, when Han's off doing ... whatever."

Rey's taken aback by the bitterness in her tone, but Leia either doesn't notice or doesn't care, leaning up to press a kiss to the corner of Amilyn's mouth. "Thank you," she says fervently, and in that moment Rey sees so much of the same contradictory intense devotion that Ben looks at her with that it nearly leaves her breathless.

"Thank you," Ben echoes, mostly to himself as the toddler struggles upright, making an exaggerated noise of disgust at the affection.

"Stop distracting her, Mama," he complains. "Auntie Amilyn said she'd tell me the names of more stars today."

Just like that Leia's smile softens into something sweet and light, an expression that Rey could hardly imagine seeing on the face of the General Organa she knows now.

"Well, if _Auntie Amilyn_ promised, then what's the point of your Mama at all, hm?" Leia says lightly, gently prodding Ben's stomach as he gives in and laughs.

The child pretends to give the question due consideration for a moment, before exclaiming, "hair braiding!" and flinging his arms around Leia's neck.

Leia chuckles, wrapping her arms around Ben in turn, and Amilyn turns slightly on the worn wooden bench the better to hug them both. In the brief quiet, Rey looks over to Ben — present Ben, _her_ Ben, the reason she's here — and almost asks a question, something to fill the companionable silence between them that is surely too precious to last.

But Ben just tilts his head towards his younger self, raises an eyebrow as if to say, _see? Amilyn_ , and he looks more at peace than she thinks she's ever seen him, so she doesn't. She wants to reach out, wrap her arms around him, give him some fragmentary reconstruction of this scene he so clearly loved, but she doesn't do that either.

She never had this, doesn't know the rules, and it's a relief when Amilyn disentangles herself from the other two enough to pull her small charge onto her lap again and say, "So, little star, tell me about the ones you remember."

Ben's small forehead creases in concentration as he squints up at the sky. "Brentaal," he says confidently, pointing to a bright white dot nearly directly overhead. "And Tepasi, and Carida, and ..."

He hesitates over another bright one close to the horizon, and Amilyn quickly redirects his attention east. "So serious, little star, this wasn't supposed to be a test. Here, what about those two? They're a trinary system but we can only see two from here, so ..."

Rey tunes her out, a cold suspicion settling in her gut at Amilyn's obvious avoidance tactic. "Was that ..."

Ben nods, lower lip caught between his teeth. "Alderaan. I knew the name even then, I think, but it was a long time before I knew the stories. Or maybe it just felt like it. You'll see."

So much death in his blood that Leia had tried to keep from him, Rey thinks. Was it really any wonder he had tried so awfully, so imperfectly, to make it his own?

On Jakku, one of the first things you learnt in the desert was that you were just as dead as the bones that came before you, except unlike them you had days ahead. Wither or wait, there was a chance at life, and all Ben had had was ...

Well. He had had this, once.

Had Amilyn, who he was asking, "What about the constellations? What do they _mean_?"; had Leia, who was idly braiding the ends of his hair as she listened.

"Well, it depends on the planet," Amilyn says slowly. "For you ... hm, there." Amilyn points to the sky, traces a swooping, jagged line. "That's your constellation. The Crown of the River. It's a wonderful month to see it."

Toddler Ben claps his approval, nearly flinging his toy into the fire in the process, while next to Rey, Ben makes a small, pained sound. Rey wonders how Chandrila's crowned river differs from her own privately named River on Jakku. Most of the other scavengers called it the Snake, and some of them connected it to one of the Patient Knights to form the Crossed Swords, but Rey had known better from the first night she saw it rise.

"Where's your constellation?" Ben asks impatiently. "Where's Mama's?"

"Well," Amilyn starts hesitantly, and though the fire isn't bright enough for Rey to make out exact expressions, she's sure the look Leia and Amilyn share is one of sudden discomfort. "Neither of us were born on Chandrila, little star. I was born on Gatalenta, and we have five suns, so five constellations, and your mama ..."

"Is going to make more tea," Leia says abruptly, using her momentary height advantage to drop a kiss to Amilyn's temple as she gets up and busies herself with the cooking utensils. "Lyn, tell him what his constellations would have been on Gatalenta."

Amilyn smiles, her voice taking on a dreamy quality as she begins to speak. "The biggest sun, and the first to rise each day, is Ilmatar, who is the mother of all creation and the air around us all. Then comes Mielikki, robed in blue like the trees, and she is the one who heals us all, if we know how to ask. Her daughter Tellervo guides the forests and the harvests. Näkki lights the waters especially, and through them she transforms us all. Last to rise and set is Louhi, governor of death and change, because with her comes both true day and true night."

Rey looks back and forth between the man at her side, silently mouthing the names of the suns along with Amilyn, and the child by the fire, who's quiet for a moment before asking, "And they're all girls?"

"In most traditions, yes. But you can tell any story you want, little star."

" _Coooool_ ," Ben whispers, sticking his thumb in his mouth while he thinks about that. "So where'm I?"

"When you were born," Amilyn says, though she's looking at Leia rather than the child in her lap, and Rey shivers slightly as Ben moves closer to her. "When you were born, on Gatalenta Louhi was highest in the sky, and Ilmatar slept in the Desert Castle, and I was so, _so_ excited to meet my darling Leia's little star and tell you all about the worlds you would see."

Rey lets Amilyn's comforting voice wash over her as she continues with the broad strokes of Ben's Gatalentan astrology, thinking about how much could be contained in so few words. Of being someone like Amilyn, who spoke with the weight of the broad strokes of histories behind her but was so clearly tailoring her talk of the future to the people she loved.

She had _worked_ for the futures the Force bond had shown her, flung herself through the stars for what they'd told her. When had Ben stopped being allowed to work for the future his child self had been so enraptured by?

"— and a future built from the hands of the dead," Ben finally finishes the end of Amilyn's story with her, and Rey starts, looks back to him, surprised.

"Do you really remember this? All of this, being ... what, three?"

Ben gives a half-shrug that really only serves to curl his body in on itself. "Birth chart, remember? She drew it all out for me, stars and moons and constellations and hyperspace lanes. And all the interpretations ... well, the ones she thought were important anyway, on the back."

Rey thinks about Jakku's stars, about her own stories and the other scavenges'. What would Amilyn have to say about those silent, comforting watchers? Would Amilyn let her keep The Mountain, chosen as it was by her own care and not by the accident of her birth?

"So does Mama get constellations too?" The child Ben asks insistently, pulling their attention back to the fire. Leia stiffens, begins to slowly make her way back to Amilyn's side with two mugs.

"Mama ..." Amilyn sighs, bites her lip and looks to Leia for help. Gets only a weak smile in return. "Mama can't go back to her planet, okay? So we have to give her all the stories and all the love from all of our planets."

"Why can't she go back?" Ben frowns, his mouth trembling in an eerily familiar expression. "It's not fair."

Leia places the mugs by the fireside, slips into place at Amilyn's side and resumes playing with Ben's hair as if she'd never left. "No, Ben, it's not. Very little in life is to start with, unless we work to make it fair.

Ben looks back and forth between them, uncannily solemn for someone so young. "Can we make _this_ fair then?"

Neither of them answer for a long moment, until, with a cheerfulness that Rey thinks even little Ben must know isn't entirely genuine, Amilyn says, "Maybe in the morning, little star. We can plan on our hike, okay?"

Ben opens his mouth, probably to protest, but yawns instead. "Promise?"

"Sure," Leia and Amilyn say in chorus, as Amilyn stands up, anchoring Ben on her hip with one hand and reaching the other out to help Leia to her feet.

She kisses the back of Leia's hand, murmurs something Rey can't quite make out. Ben makes a content, sleepy noise and anchors a small fist in the sleeve of her dress. Rey feels something shiver in the Force then, a love so vast and ever-present it seems _impossible_ that Amilyn could ever be put so simply in the past.

"That was Amilyn," Ben says quietly as Leia and Amilyn make their way to the tent, the fire casting their shadows beyond the tree line. "Is, maybe." He swallows hard, looks up at her with tearful eyes. "I couldn't leave her."

And there isn't really anything Rey can think of to say to that other than, "I know," as the memory fades to blue around them.


	3. Chapter 3

It's hard to move along the scars of life  
Memories are blooming in the gloom  
As I'm feeling so cold inside  
— Lacuna Coil, "One Cold Day"

The _Falcon_ 's cockpit seems claustrophobic after the wide Chandrilan skies, even though Rey knows intellectually that she probably never physically left it. Ben is watching her with a sort of pleading hope, anxious with how much he's shared, and Rey thinks it might be a death of her if she's not careful.

Thinks, as she watches Ben chew his lip in a silence that isn't quite fearful, that she might be a death of _him_ if she isn't careful, doesn't say the right thing, and the idea that she might have that sort of power over him is almost more frightening than Snoke.

No one should have that kind of power over him, over _anyone_.

"Thank you," she finally says, because it is the only thing that feels safe. He relaxes, just a fraction, like he's letting her words guide him back to the present.

"It worked," he says, eyes alight. "It really — we're really — _oh_."

His relief is so palpable through the bond that Rey almost feels she could reach out and touch it. Feels, for a moment, like it's infinitely more probable than the chance she would ever be able to touch Ben again. "Not alone," she says again, a reality more precious than she had ever expected it to be.

"No," he agrees. "And not how it was before, either?"

There's a universe of hurts in his one question, of people turned away and questions left unanswered. "Not like before," she agrees, and, silently, through the bond: _the pain cannot have you_.

The corner of his mouth ticks up in something that's maybe a smile, maybe just acknowledgment. "How much could you see?"

"Some. A lot, actually, I think. Is she force-sensitive?" Rey asks curiously. She's beginning to be able to tell sometimes, she thinks, if she cedes enough of her human senses to the Force and lets it guide her to see others' spirits with something that isn't quite sight.

Amilyn, in memory and in life, is an enigma, a drifting twist of light that weaves in and out of the Force without ever quite laying a claim on it, or having one laid in return.

Ben frowns at Amilyn's still body as if the question had never occurred to him. "I ... don't know," he says slowly. "My ... Leia used to tease her about it. To say she could be a Jedi or a Senator or a Nightsister or whatever she wanted if she wasn't so busy being _Amilyn_."

Rey has no idea what a Nightsister is, but all the words seem to carry a sort of obligation she can't reconcile with her sense of Amilyn's life. "Maybe being Amilyn was all she wanted," Rey says softly. "Being with you two."

But it hadn't been enough for Ben, and neither of them have anything else to say to that.

"The things she said," Rey finally says haltingly, when the silence is too much to bear and the Force is too still between them. "About the constellations. Destinies. Did you believe her?"

"Sometimes," he says, one hand idly tracing out what looks like the Crowned River along the edge of the console. "In a ... _oh, she said this would happen_ way. Belief ..." His eyes narrow, regret shuddering along their bond. "Maybe not enough. More, now, I think."

"You believed in fate," she says. _In us_. "Is that why you're here?" _Didn't you choose me?_

The question spills unbidden from her lips before she's entirely sure she wants an answer, like being with Ben has cracked open the years of the desert's silence and now something between them needs to _keep_ breaking, until they have enough pieces to build a better whole.

"Some things are fated. Hatred. Loneliness. You."

Rey stares in shock, but he seems earnest, utterly so — and when, she thinks, has he ever been anything other than _utterly_ whatever he's feeling in the moment? He feels with an intensity that would frighten her, if she didn't know it for her own: feelings, much like lives, were too easily lost to Jakku's shifting sands if they weren't hoarded, magnified, used to fill some of the gap she'd kept for her family.

And now they're all that's there. She blinks, shakes her head. "That's grim company I'm keeping."

"You make the rest bearable," he mumbles, spots of colour appearing high on his cheekbones. "Different. More balanced."

Not for the first time, the level of trust in his voice unbalances her, so at odds it is with the fatalistic note in his voice. "It can't just be me, Ben. The other things they're ... they're not inevitable. Not if you stop reaching for them."

His mouth drops open in shock, like maybe this is the first time someone's told him that. "It's not about reaching. They're just ... there."

"But you have to choose what ..." What had Amilyn said? _Tell whatever stories you want_. "What you want to do about them. Our stories on Jakku were guides."

"Choice," he echoes, harsh and almost wistful. "That's something you take for granted easily, hm?"

For the first time, Rey wonders just how many of Ben's thoughts have been his own since he left the Academy, since he was a child. The choice of the desert was too often only the choice of necessity, but it had always been there.

And her thoughts, her hopes and beliefs, had ever been hers. "Ben..."

Ben drops his gaze. In the bond, she can feel the weight of all the things he isn't saying, all the things he _wants_ to say and never learnt the words for.

"We had a river in the sky on Jakku too," Rey says. It's not enough for the words he can't say, the ones that will only come with time, but it's something. Maybe even enough for now. "And no one could agree if it meant the past, back when Jakku used to be green, or the future, when we would all get off that rock.

There's a reluctant note of interest in his voice when he asks, "So what did it mean to you?"

"Both," she replies simply. "You can't have one without the other, so it had to be both. Not that most people liked that view."

But it startles a half-approving laugh out him, and the fear around her heart eases slightly. "Amilyn would love that. She was always collecting stories from every planet she visited, trying to find patterns." He looks up, eyes gone distant with memory. "She'd make us jewellery from them, me and Leia. I wonder if they're still there, on Chandrila somewhere."

Rey can't help but smile at that. Now she knows what Ben looked like as a toddler, it's all too easy to imagine him and Leia together, the same long dark hair and sharp-soft eyes, with matching jewellery. Silver bracelets, maybe, like the ones Amilyn had been wearing before she ended up in the wreckage. "I bet you looked just alike."

Abruptly, his face shutters, and she can feel him pulling away from the bond. "It was a long time ago." _Kriff._ She'd forgotten how to be this sort of careful.

"Do you want to see Jakku?" she blurts out, desperate to bring him back. _Not now. Not when you're already here._ "I can show you the river. Tell you ... other stories."

He's quiet for a long moment, just looking at Amilyn as if he might find answers stitched across her broken body. "Sure," he says. "I think I'd like that."

Rey sighs in relief, flips back through the pages of memory to a night not long after she'd arrived on Jakku, when Mashra had taught her how to navigate by the stars. Reaches out to Ben, just like she had hours ago, days ago —

_will always be reaching out to him_

— "Come with me," she says as the bubble of the Force builds up and up around them, and he lifts his head to meet her gaze, and he does.


	4. Chapter 4

I live in a world of fire and sand. The crimson sun scorches the life from anything that crawls or flies, and storms of sand scour the foliage from the barren ground. This is a land of blood and dust, where tribes of feral elves sweep out of the salt plains to plunder lonely caravans, mysterious singing winds call travelers to slow suffocation in the Sea of Silt, and selfish kings squander their subjects' lives building gaudy palaces and garish tombs.  
— From "The Wanderer's Journal", D&D 4th Edition _Dark Sun_ Campaign Setting

Jakku's midday heat is oppressive, even in memory. Rey reaches instinctively to check her wraps before realising that it doesn't matter here, the sun that raised her every morning can't touch her anymore. Adjusts them anyway, just to have something to do with her hands.

"Where are we?" Ben asks. His face is twisted in displeasure when she turns to him, the words muffled by the gloved hand over his mouth, as if he fears the taste of sand even in their semi-corporeal forms.

"Under my stars," Rey says. She squints at the sky, two thumb-widths to the left of the sun just like she was taught, and judges they probably have a good seven hours still til twilight. "Or, well. That was the plan." She wasn't sure how Ben had called his memory of Chandrila to them — isn't, still, sure that _he_ knew — but the Force certainly seemed to have decided that the night of storytelling with Mashra that she had been focussing on wasn't really the memory she needed to share with him.

Trades. Rey isn't at all sure that she likes having a _destiny_ broker this exchange of memories, but this day, whichever it is, is one that she's willing to share.

"So then where are _you_?" Ben asks, and Rey shakes her head, returns to scanning their surroundings.

She can't see the smoke from Niima — can't, in fact, see any signs of life other than the desert's at all at first glance, until a flicker of heat transforms into a small red speeder. "There," she grins. "Flying."

The speeder crests over the swell of a sand dune, drawing nearer and nearer until they can make out the small figure perched atop it. Under all the wrappings it's impossible to make out any features, but Rey looks at the mask, at the makeshift goggles and not quite complete speeder, and thinks she can't be any older than ten.

The drone of the speeder is a heavy counterpoint to the high sharp wind that doesn't quite lift their hair, and for a moment Rey imagines that her own heart, and Ben's too, could sing, could join the melody of Jakku so like and so unlike the silent song of the Force, and in it find ...

Silly dreams, she thinks, shaking her head to clear it. Anything worth keeping that she found on Jakku she can repurpose, refit, bring back into her new life, and Ben's as well.

Ben makes a low noise of appreciation, drawing her out of her thoughts. "Clever little ship. How much did it cost?"

Rey scowls, draws herself up to stand just a little taller. "I made it," she snaps, not bothering to keep the offence from her tone. "Things I found, things Unkar wouldn't take and ones he didn't know about. Some things I traded the Teedos for. You want to know how many half-portions each component cost? Because I remember."

She raises her chin, dares him to say anything else, but instead his face softens into that beautiful, terrifying awe. "I didn't mean it like that. It truly is beautiful, you did well."

"You barely even saw it," she says, resolutely ignoring the smile tugging at the corner of her mouth. "Come on. Let's go find ... me."

The child Rey, of course, hadn't seen the two figures observing her, hadn't had any reason to stop, and though it's easier to move across the sands in this half-real form, keeping up with a speeder is a futile hope. But the currents of the Force had placed them with a purpose, and it's hardly five minutes' walking in the rough-burnt sands before they see the speeder parked atop a rough outcropping of rock, the girl kneeling on the plateau beside it.

Rey frowns. The desert geography was never static — landmark skeletons of downed ships could too easily be monarchs one day and buried the next if the winds were cruel — and navigation by sun and moon and stars always safer, but the way things appear and disappear in the Force is unsettling.

Familiarity returns when they reach her younger self, though, memories of all the times she'd walked the same path reverberating through the Force, through her body, drawing her forward as the child fiddles with a pile of rocks, arranging and rearranging them to form a sort of doorway. She can feel the heat of Ben's gaze on her, warmer than the sun.

"Ruins," she says, before he can ask. "Hard to find on purpose, harder to find again. Good for shelter, though, and more unique salvage."

What she doesn't say yet is that the ruins had a first, more primal draw far more unnameable, that she had jealously guarded the secret of their location with a fear more intense than simply that of someone else nicking her salvage. That he's the first person she's ever brought here, maybe the only living person besides herself and the spectres she had found there over the years to know they exist.

But maybe he knows all of that anyway, because as the sand marked out by the child's stones rises in a small whirlwind and clears to reveal a stone slab slowly moving aside to reveal a staircase, he says, " _Sith_ ruins. The last of the Empire, the last of maybe more than we knew."

She raises an eyebrow at _we_ , but doesn't have a chance to say more than, "Perhaps we'll see about that," before the child Rey disappears down the steps, carefully clutching a canvas bag, and Rey moves to follow her.

Ben trails an appreciative hand over the speeder as he follows the girl, and Rey bites her lip as she stars at his long fingers, tries to tell herself that the flush of pride at his approval is truly nothing more than pride.

Darkness rises around them as they descend the spiral stairs, the light of the sun slowly receding under the twists and turns of stone. Rey remembers how the air used to shift around her when she entered the ruins, turning a sort of cold more comforting than desert nights could hope to be, and though in the moment she no longer has a body capable of feeling the chill, she feels a corresponding change in the Force.

Ben gasps, abnormally loud in the silence of the underground, the sound reverberating off the stone walls. Rey pauses, turns to him, finds him paler than she's ever seen. "You alright?" she asks.

"Yes." He's stopped too, one hand against the wall for balance as he leans forward, trying to catch his breath as if they had instead been climbing _up_ the staircase for hours. "Don't you feel it?"

There's just enough of a slight edge of desperation in his voice that she's almost unsure when she replies, "Yes?" She reaches out for their bond, tries to press her understanding of this ruin's Force through to him: coldness, and hunger, and a vast alien yearning skittering through blood and bone whispering _yes, find more_.

His eyes widen and darkness floods back to her, nearly as concentrated as she'd felt in the mirror cave but far more conflicted, and now it's her turn to gasp. She staggers backwards with the force of it — _so much, how can one person possibly feel so much_ — and then there's nothing under her feet at all, just stone under her body and dust under her nails and she's lying at the foot of the stairs, unnameable stars swimming in front of her eyes.

" _Rey_!" The sheer panic in his voice has her struggling to her feet as he races down the steps, arms outstretched. He stops half a moment before his foot would hit the ground. "Are you — did I —"

"I'm fine," she says hoarsely, rubbing her shoulder. "I don't think we can be hurt like this. Not physically, anyway. What was ...?"

But she has a pretty good idea, even as his eyes darken. She hadn't had names for all the disparate feelings of ruins when she was little, hadn't had the time to think about them when she was so focussed on salvage. Unkar underpaid for Imperial and Rebel gear alike, but everyone on Jakku knew that Imperial salvage was better quality, was more likely to work. There was the cold, whenever she descended there was the need to find _one more thing_ to make it through the day, and very little time for parsing the specifics of this ruin's Force, especially before she had known what it was.

This ruin's Force.

This ruined Force.

Ben had mentioned the Sith artifacts when they were on Chandrila, she thinks. Perhaps that's why they're here now, following the memory of her down a walk so long she used to think it might never have been real.

Not for the first time, she wonders if this is how she'll quantify the things each of them have given up in chasing the never-ending dream that they might no longer have the need to be alone. Wonders if, after she's laid out all the changes in front of her, she'll still have someone like Luke saying _no, it's not worth it_.

"Rey?" Ben says plaintively, and she realises with a start that he's moved closer, that she's missed his last words.

"Sorry," she says reflexively, and blinks at how natural the apology feels. "We should, um." When had he moved this close? "There's a relic room before the main inner chamber. I think this one might've been a tomb. We should see what she — what I found."

She knows what she found — if she's being honest with herself she's known what the Force brought them here to witness, known _why_ she wanted Ben to see it with her, since the moment she saw the speeder outside.

But neither memories nor dreams had been kind for a long time, and it's easier to dust her palms off on her leggings and stride down the hall, dimly grey with a light source she'd never managed to find. It's not leaving Ben if she knows he's following, is it?

The double doors to the relic room are flanked by two statues, their faces hidden in the shadows where they brush the ceiling. Ahead, Rey can see the brighter light of her younger self's torch, bobbing along so much closer to the ground than she remembered being, but behind her, Ben's footsteps have stopped, and turns to him with a frown. "What now?"

He's staring up at the statues, eyes narrowed like he's trying to solve a particularly vexing puzzle. She wonders, suddenly, if this is a good idea at all, bringing him even now into a place so dark, into a place that seems to be tugging insistently at the dark spaces within him. Her hand hovers over the saber at her waist, though she's not sure it would do any good in a memory.

"Kreia," he says, and she shakes her head in confusion. "And Meetra Surik."

"You can't just keep naming women like I know who they are," she sighs, trying not to let the impatience bleed too far into her voice. But she gives in, to his interest and her own curiosity, and asks, "Alright, who were they?"

"Balance," he says simply. "Or they could have been. How their statues ended up here ... but don't you see?" He looks down, eyes shining in the gloom. "This is what we're meant for, Rey. Together, the way they couldn't be."

"Ben ..." She doesn't know what to say, isn't sure what to feel at the revelation that the statues she'd passed so often had _names_ , had been _people_. Easier, far easier, to think of them as histories rather than fates. "I thought we were supposed to be building something new."

He looks ... _soft_ , somehow, despite the darkness she can still feel swirling around him. Around them. If she touched him, would he feel soft?

"It doesn't mean we have to start from —"

Something clatters across the floor on the other side of the relic room, and Rey winces at the memory of stone scraping across her shins. Even with her torch, she had never quite managed to remember all the loose stones well enough to avoid them.

"Come on," she says, glad for the excuse to leave aside questions of dead Sith lords and the women they may or may not have loved for the moment.

For all he walks slowly behind her just like he had on Chandrila, there's a sense of comfort in his presence here that there hadn't been in his own memories. Rey breathes deep, misses the sharp tang of tomb dust at the back of her throat, and hopes that comfort has less to do with the dark than she can't help but think it does.

The child Rey is already in the innermost chamber by the time they arrive, kneeling on the raised central altar and carefully arranging brass plates that glimmer softly in the light from her torch.

"Star charts," Ben says, and it's not a question.

"Mhm," Rey agrees. "I found the Observatory the first day I took the speeder out. I just wanted to go ... as far as I could. It was hours before a storm came up, and I was too far out to race it to Niima. Found a cave in the Carbon Ridge and, well."

She's rambling, she knows, but it feels natural, in a way that talking never really has before. And a small, selfish part of her revels in the idea that, for once, there's something about history she knows that he doesn't — something, she corrects that impulse, that she can share with him, exchange with him, use to repay him a fraction of what he's taught her.

Even with Ben, she fears, too many things come at a price, at least now.

"You can come out now," the child says suddenly, sitting back on her heels and surveying her work. "It's five pieces, like you said, but I'm not sure it's all of them."

Rey holds her breath as the robed figure emerges from the far corner. At ten, alone, she hadn't been afraid, hardened by the desert, armoured by the few scavengers like Mashra who found her useful. Now, with Ben, with far more knowledge of what could lie in Sith tombs, she wonders if she had just been luckier than she had ever been able to conceptualise.

The figure comes forward slowly, seeming to glide more than walk, their pale silver eyes all that were visible under robes that flowed purple-black like the deepest void of space.

 _"You've done well."_ The words are spoken aloud, Rey thinks — or, at least, she thinks they _had_ been, when she was a girl. Now she hears them in the Force, infinitely present.

Rey slaps her small hands down on the charts as the figure draws nearer. "Thank you. Food?"

One clawed hand emerges from the folds of their robe to place a medium sized sack on the altar. Without breaking the figure's gaze, Rey lifts one hand to pull it closer, untie the drawstring with deft fingers and reach inside, conducting her own private count. The figure just watches.

It had been more food than she could ever remember seeing in one place before, Rey remembers, and unlike in Niima, they hadn't taken offence at her need to be _sure_.

Finally Rey nods her satisfaction, grabs the sack with both hands and scuttles to the end of the altar, clutching it protectively as the figure traces paths across the chart. _"As we agreed,"_ they murmur their thanks, starting to gather the pieces together, disrupting the map Rey had so carefully laid out.

"What are they maps of?" the child asks impulsively.

Ben flinches at the forwardness, but the figure doesn't seem to take offence. Indeed, there's a smile evident in their voice when they say, _"The Unknown."_

Rey nibbles on something pulled from the bag while she considers that answer. "Okay. Should I find more?"

 _"Yes."_ Maps in hand, they turn and drift back towards the far wall. To another exit, Rey had thought when she was a child, but now she wonders if perhaps they simply dwelt in the tomb, some strange manifestation of light and dark.

Ben waits until the girl has hopped off the altar and set off back towards the way they'd come in before speaking. "Rey," he says, and she inhales sharply at the realisation that this is the first time since they left the _Supremacy_ that he's said her name. It seems to give the moment a disproportionate weight when all he says is "What ... was that?"

Rey shrugs, tries to ignore the way her heart's beating like it wants to burst from her chest. "I don't know. I think I thought they were a dream."

She's not sure, anymore, if that's true. Certainly the food they had offered in trade was real, and more and different than anything Unkar would give her. But something still pulls at her memory, real-not-real, and even though she's just seen one of them again she still finds it nearly impossible to believe they were anything at all.

"No," he says rapturously, and he's sinking to his knees in front of her, chin raised and neck bared to her. "They talked to you, and you understood. They ..."

Something, _everything_ seems to be hanging on his next words, the whole universe waiting for one more revelation. The air between them flickers red like the twilight sun, and for a moment, Rey forgets how to breathe. Doesn't _need_ to breathe.

"They were real," he insists. _Say it_. "They were navigators. On Snoke's ship."

Cold horror twists in Rey's gut. What had she given them, these half-remembered trades? What had she done?

"No." Sensing her concern, he reaches up, his hand hovering at her hip. "Don't worry, not navigators like that. They cared nothing for your Resistance."

It's only half a comfort but she exhales anyway, more because her lungs are burning than out of any true relief. "Then if they were real ..." She doesn't even know what to ask.

"They created hyperspace trails through the Unknown Regions," he says, voice trembling. "It's where I would have taken you, if ... oh, _Rey_."

He reaches out through their bond, every sense open with wonder, and she cannot help but reciprocate — reaching out, as she does, for any trace of the strange alien figure. But she finds nothing but _Ben_ , overwhelming and _right_ , and she doesn't have time to begin to process what it means to connect like this in this nowhere place before pure _feeling_ swallows her, swallows him, swallows the tomb, and all is blue.


	5. Chapter 5

There's yet life in these words I speak for peace of mind and our release,  
And you can have what you want if you want it like you need to breathe.  
— Poets of the Fall, "Can You Hear Me"

They are, this time in exactly the same positions as they were in the Force. She had expected it to feel — _off_ , somehow, now that the tomb was gone, Jakku was gone, the clouding swirls of the past and the Force dissipated. But still there is this: Ben, on his knees, in a ship both of them had once called something like home.

"Ben," she says, and her voice is as dry as the sands they had just walked. "Ben, stand up. Please."

He scrambles to his feet without a word, eyes still wide and bright, and the old fear comes creeping back. No one should obey her so quickly. "It's okay, Ben," she says gently. "That wasn't ... it wasn't what I had meant to show you. I didn't do that on purpose."

His mouth twists. "Think I'm afraid of the dark?"

"Yes," she says honestly, and in the slightly stunned silence that follows, they both sit down again awkwardly. _Well_ , Rey thinks, that wasn't quite what she'd meant for.

"You weren't afraid," he points out, and Rey wonders if he means on Jakku or on Ahch-To.

"Maybe I should have been." But she can't stop thinking about _choice_ , about Snoke's lingering imprint on Ben's Force signature, and thinks maybe she only wasn't afraid because she jumped, rather than being pushed.

He hasn't denied his fear. She's not sure he _can_ , not when she can feel it through their bond, but these words, too, she doesn't make him say.

"Luke used to say fear was the path to the dark side," he says thoughtfully. "You think you're stronger than that."

It isn't a question, not really, and the weight of the judgment he's passing sits uneasily on her shoulders.

"I'm not sure Luke knew what he was talking about." She bites her lip, almost laughs at the thought of how very _Ben_ that gesture is. "Fear kept me alive in the desert. It was only reasonable, if you ever saw a sandstorm coming towards you ..." She sighs, feels the burning heat of Ben's gaze at the back of her neck as she stares at the stars inching past outside. Sub-light looks different in space than in a speeder.

"The Force isn't a desert," he says, but there's no conviction behind the words. Just a soft bland certainty, like he's reciting from a remembered text, or maybe something Snoke had said so often it was just another truth. "The Force is —"

"All things, Ben. Not just all good things or all the bad."

"Three days with Skywalker and you're some kind of Jedi Knight?" His lip curls, unease hiding the vulnerability so often evident in that soft mouth of his.

Rey is fairly certain if she were some kind of Jedi Knight she wouldn't be torn between the twin impulses to punch or kiss that expression off his face. "Three days with Skywalker and I know for sure that it isn't the Jedi or their texts who're going to save the galaxy," she sighs.

He smiles slightly, opens his mouth, and she can _feel_ his reply before he verbalises it. "No, not the First Order, either. Not even Snoke's attendants, whatever they are. You weren't wrong about some of the past needing to die."

"Then why didn't you come with me?" he asks, almost plaintively.

She almost had. In the flames, when the emotions between them had been as raw and open as the expanse of stars beyond the _Supremacy_ 's shattered walls, she had seen his offer, his _future_ , something that was simultaneously free and more demanding than anything she'd ever been offered before.

"Because ..." Because it hadn't been _right_ , she had known deep down as surely as her connection to the Force and yet just as inexplicably. "Because neither of us deserve that, Ben. A life on the run? In the Unknown Regions? Hunted by everything and everyone we would have to abandon?"

There are other questions she wants to ask: _Why did you come with me? Why did you bring Amilyn with us?_ But she doesn't, because she's seen the beginnings of answers take shape over the last few hours of conversation and memory, and they fill her with the sort of hope she'd only ever seen before in Leia's eyes.

She understands, now, why Leia clings so fiercely to it.

Ben props his chin on his hands, looks up with wide uncertain eyes. "I left for you, Rey. Snoke needed to die. And what sort of life would you be leaving, anyway? Burnt sand and a dead Sith tomb. That doesn't make a home, not like we could."

"It's not like I lived down there," she says defensively, trying to quell the way her traitor heart _sings_ at the idea of building a home with him. "It was just ... a part of my life, sometimes." Days when fevers wracked her thin form and she couldn't make it out to the graveyards, days when it had been weeks since Unkar had given her more than a quarter-portion for a piece of salvage, days when her hands ached and bled from too many failed attempts at fixing up a broken engine part and she would take her doll of Raeh and a chart and fly out to the tomb, fall asleep in a quiet coolness that didn't herald a coming storm, and wake to find the chart replaced with food or medicine.

Living. It was ever a curiosity, on Jakku, and the strangeness catches in Rey's throat, pushes forward until she has no choice but to open the bond a bit wider, leave the memory of those days open to him even as she tries to anchor them firmly in the now, to not let either of them slip away. She watches his eyelashes flutter, dark against his pale cheeks, as he tries to take them in.

"But it was something of a home for you anyway, wasn't it?" he presses on insistently, and she wonders which of them he's trying to convince. "You find homes, and you keep them secret, and make them your own, and sometimes ... sometimes it's not enough. Sometimes the darkness was there first and even before you came along, and the people whose job it is to keep you safe from it only push it back a little bit."

 _Darkness_ , still and again. Rey's beginning to think they mean entirely different things by that. "It's not that easy for darkness to win, Ben. You're here, aren't you?"

 _Here_ , so close they're almost touching; _here_ , closer to each other's minds than they could possibly be without changing the other by the simple fact of their presence. "Years too late," he says, as if that doesn't matter, and Rey nearly screams in frustration.

"Not too late for me," she says, and she can hear her own voice tremble with the effort of keeping it flat. "Not too late for anyone who matters. Part of you must know that." Doubt resonates through the bond, sharp like teeth at her side, and she flinches at a pain that's nearly physical. "Think about Amilyn, Ben," she urges, "what would she think? You can make peace with ... in more ways than you think."

"Peace," he laughs, but it's a hollow, joyless sound. "You sound like her, sometimes. Gatalenta's tranquility this, meditation that. Maybe if it had been her..."

Rey relaxes, reaches out so her hand rests just next to Ben's on the nav console. "Show me?" she asks, trying to make it a request rather than an order. If walking back is to be this road, step by step, she's determined to walk it with him, see what waits for her along the way. "Show me that it wasn't always dark."

Something flickers in his eyes, like maybe he's going to argue again, but instead he turns his hand so it brushes hers just slightly, and says, "For you," so softly it's more a breath than words.


	6. Chapter 6

Blue is for cruel bargains; green is for daring what you oughtn't; violet is for brute force. I will say to you: Coral coaxes; pink insists; red compels. I will say to you: You are dear to me as attar of roses. Please do not get eaten.  
— Lebedeva, in Catherynne M. Valente's _Deathless_

They're somewhere inside, this time. It's the first thing Rey notices, the threads of light shot through the endless blues of the force between them braiding, spinning, _building_ until a room takes shape around her.

It's _lived-in_ , is her first thought. Nothing like the tiny cave of her AT-AT, which every day fought the sand for life. Nothing even like the sparse utilitarian organised quarters on the Resistance base, which, from her brief stay, she gathered to have space for very few physical reminders of ... home.

It's a home, like nothing she's ever had, but from the strangled noise Ben makes at her side she understands instinctively that this was _his_ home, at one time. His home, where he grew up with food every day, with parents, with ...

She looks up, only noticing then that she's sat cross-legged on the floor, and, as if summoned by the previous thought, sees the woman herself on the other side of the room, tucked into an oversized armchair next to a small table covered in datapads. Leia's young, here, but Rey sees easily enough the princess, the senator, the mother, the general. Leia carries each of them in every line of her body with an ease Rey envies, an ease that seems as if it should be impossible when Leia's in such casual clothes, little curls escaping the long circle of her braid.

"This house," Ben says softly. He's near to whispering, even though the memories can't see or hear them. Rey leans close and doesn't think about how with just the slightest shift she could rest her head on his shoulder. "This was where I learned about building homes. Where Amilyn —"

He looks like an intruder in his own home, almost fearful, and Rey bites down on the anger. This vision is for him, like Jakku's was for her, and there will be time enough for them to share, after.

Before she can say anything, though, he turns, following a sound or perhaps an echo, and when Rey follows the line of his gaze she sees why: Amilyn, standing in the archway leading to what must be a hall. Her hair is silver now, and nearly as long as Leia's, and her hands are resting on a child's shoulders.

Rey slides forward, trying to get a better look. It's unmistakably Ben, she would know by the hair if nothing else: it brushes just past his shoulders in a riot of curls to rival Amilyn's with a few small braids that look like miniature versions of his mother's. He's wearing a dress, something silky and green that drops off his shoulders into wide sleeves and with skirts that nearly reach the floor.

"Oh," she says before she can help herself, "so you _did_ wear colours, once." She hadn't been able to tell, when he had shown her the night of stargazing, and she can't imagine Kylo Ren in anything other than black.

Ben looks at her with a strange mixture of surprise, relief, and offence, like he was expecting something so much worse that he can't properly give her grief for what she _did_ say. "I —"

But he's saved, once again, by the memories.

"Doesn't he look lovely, Leia?" Amilyn is saying, in a tone that strongly suggests this isn't the first time she's tried to get Leia's attention in the past few minutes.

"No," Ben frowns, leaning into her side. "It's a girl day now."

"Sorry, little star. Leia, doesn't she look lovely?"

Across the room, Leia looks up from her datapad, distractedly pushing her glasses up her nose. Still her voice is fond when she says, "She does indeed, dear."

"Auntie Amilyn said I could _keep_ it," Ben says solemnly, running a reverent hand down her skirt. The green fabric ripples under her hand, catching the light in bright shimmers that seem to have a life of their own.

Leia smiles at that, gets up and crosses the room so she can slip an arm around Amilyn's waist and one over Ben's shoulder. "Amilyn's good like that," she murmurs, bending to kissing the top of Ben's head. "Will you help her with dinner?"

Ben wrinkles her nose. "But it's _early_. And you said _you_ would help tonight!"

Leia and Amilyn exchange a look over Ben's head. Amilyn's is irritated, Leia's apologetic, and even from her strange intruder's vantage point Rey knows that for them, in that moment, the child sandwiched between them doesn't truly exist.

"I have some reports to finish, first," Leia finally says, a not quite denial that means _no_ more clearly than some refusals.

Ben whines softly, and Amilyn kneels down to look her in the eyes. "How about this, little star? You go get your calligraphy set, and we'll practise for an hour, and maybe then Mama's gonna be free to help us with dinner, okay?"

Ben's whole _self_ seems to light up at that. "Yeah!" She crows in triumph, wriggling out of their grasp and scampering down the hall, her skirt swirling behind her in an expression of pure joy.

"She's _nine_ , Leia," Amilyn whispers once she's out of sight, quietly furious in a tone that would no doubt go on to serve her well in the Resistance command. Rey hears Ben's sharp intake of breath beside her: this part he, too, is seeing for the first time.

In the past, the child had run off to their room, had rattled through holopads and stuffed toys and caught the unfamiliar billowing sleeves of their new dress on long-forgotten corners.

In the present, the adult watches Leia gently take Amilyn's hand between both of her own, pull her to her feet and say, "Nine is old enough to do things like that on your own. This is _important_."

"More important than us?" Amilyn asks, reaching up with her free hand to brush a strand of hair out of Leia's eyes.

Leia sighs, leans forward to rest her head on Amilyn's chest. "I want there to be a galaxy for her to grow up in. If that means Ben makes dinner without my help once in a while ..."

Amilyn opens her mouth, sighs, closes it, and drops a kiss on the top of Leia's head. "We both know it's about more than that. Ben should have a galaxy with you in it, my love. It doesn't matter how many stars she sees if the sun never illuminates a child's home."

Leia laughs, wraps her arms loosely around Amilyn's waist. "Point taken. I'm here, aren't I?"

Amilyn leans down to whisper something in Leia's ear, and Rey shifts uncomfortably. "Ben..."

He doesn't reply. The child comes clattering back into the room as Amilyn and Leia break apart, her arms full of brushes and boxes. Leia ruffles her hair as she heads back to her seat. "Don't get ink on your dress," she says, but she laughs when Ben and Amilyn turn identical expressions of mock offence towards her.

"I wrote her name," Ben says as his younger self hops up onto a chair and starts setting up materials. " _Leia_ and _home_ , all in red. I wanted to write _mother_ but Amilyn said my _R_ s were still too sloppy, and it would bring bad luck if I tried." He traces patterns on his thigh as he speaks, echoes of the brush strokes of childhood. Rey stays quiet, lets the murmured memories of the small family wrap around them. "She came home before I fell asleep every night for two weeks after that."

"She did everything for you, and she still —" Rey is losing the fight to keep her tone as neutral as possible. "My parents didn't leave for me." But the loneliness at the end was the same either way.

"And she never told me," he finishes her abandoned thought with an ease belied by the roughness of unshed tears in his voice.

Rey places her hand carefully over his, stills his restless fingers. His lip trembles with the barely contained emotion of the memory, happiness as seemingly impossible to touch as the visions in front of them.

At the table, Amilyn knocks over a pot of ink with a too-wide gesture, sends silver spilling over the table and into her lap. She laughs, swipes her fingers through through the rapidly spreading pool and dabs in into Ben's long black curls. "Now we match, little star," Amilyn grins as Ben giggles with the pure joy of a child who's gotten away with something they oughtn't have.

"Mama," she calls through her giggles, "Mama, you too, come see —"

But the vision starts to fade as Leia gets up again, tired smile back in place as Ben and Amilyn reach for her with silver-stained hands.

"Wait," Ben whispers, sliding his hand out from under Rey's, reaching out too as if he could carry something from this night back. "Not yet, this ..." She realises, almost too late, that he's fading too.

"Ben," Rey says urgently, leaning forward to grasp his wrist. "Ben, you can't stay, you can't let it take you."

He's thin and insubstantial under her hand, Ben Organa's aching untold _want_ spiraling out in a chase of a disappearance as final as any destruction Kylo Ren's wanting had ever wrought.

"Please, Ben, you can't. Amilyn needs you _now_. I —" _I need you now_. "I can't stay with you."

It's this that makes him turn, as Rey laces her fingers through his, as Leia scoops her child into her arms and lets small hands sticky with ink paint her hair.

He sees it in her eyes, he _must_ , the same promise of a future he had never quite known his mother was trying to shape. She knows he does, because she sees him make his own decision just as the living room dissolves entirely into the midnight-blue ocean of the Force.


	7. Chapter 7

I looked at the markings,  
And I looked down to my own.  
You're here, I thought.  
— Delain, "The Monarch"

The present crests back over her like a wave, spits her back onto the _Falcon_ with a suddenness unlike anything she's felt before, and Rey chokes at how hard it is to catch her breath.

"Ben." She reaches out momentarily still blind to everything but the Force, her hand curled and clawed around the memory of his. Of _holding_ his, somewhere where touch was something other than a dream for them.

She can't have lost him already. Not when she knows, real and true, that there is a place they can have that forever.

But she'd seen the best of his life, seen how badly he wanted to stay in a soft home that had things like _mothers_ and _dresses_ and _dinner_. What was the worst, then, when even loneliness could become a companion to the wilderness of a heart that, like the wilderness of the desert, could never be empty?

When he doesn't answer though, when all she hears is the gentle broken hum of the _Falcon_ around her and not even Chewie, she forces herself to blink. Once, twice, three times, and midnight recedes to show her Ben.

They had come back separately, Rey had known that from the moment she felt her empty hand. Somehow still that had not prepared her for the sight of Ben, knees pulled up to his chest and head bowed over them so he's utterly hidden by his hair.

Her hair? For all the things she'd known about Ben — known so deeply that to refuse them would be to refuse herself — that one had been a surprise. "Ben? Do you want —?"

"It wasn't always like that," Ben says, so quietly Rey doesn't so much hear the words as _feel_ them. Resonant across their bond and yet still tentative, a justification for something Ben hasn't quite puzzled out the cause of. "And even if it had been, there was always ... it was never just them, inside."

 _Inside my head_ , Rey thinks, and shivers despite herself. Ben means Snoke, she knows, the former Supreme Leader's presence clings sickly-yellow to Ben even now. And while she's not entirely a stranger to that, Ræh had always been her own creation as well as her friend.

And she'd never talked back.

"He's dead now," Rey says, wondering how many times both of them will have to say it before it feels real. Wondering if _dead_ will ever mean _gone_. "And they're ... not."

Mostly. Their first shared ghost, _Han's_ ghost, is more patient in death than life, more visible in the present that is the _Falcon_ than in any memories Ben has shared.

She'd never known that there were so many ways in which one could be _not alone_.

"Not yet," he says, finally lifting his head to stare past her at the shadowed rest of the ship where Chewie is somewhere tending to Amilyn, and the rush of emotion that accompanies his words is so _sad_ that she can't quite catch the whimper before it escapes her lips. Their bond feels deeper now, more immediate, and she's struck by the thought that for all the expressions she's seen play across his face, they've hardly touched on the depths of what he feels.

Rey props her chin on her hands, leans closer so near to touching that were he anyone else they might as well be. "Did you hate her? Ever?" She asks the question almost before it's fully taken shape in her mind, unsure whether she means Amilyn or Leia.

She knows the answer, or at least she knows the pure desperation on his face when he reached out for a Force memory of a family that would only slip between his fingers for now, but she still wants to hear him say it. Wants to be reassured that somewhere he, too, knows his own hollow borrowed heart.

Wants, in this space where everything is overly, unbearably real, to see how far they can both walk back from _you're nothing_.

"Anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering, from suffering I draw my strength." He shakes his head. "The strength she gave me ... I couldn't be angry with her. And it should have been a failure, but —"

"But it wasn't." Rey finishes the sentence for him so he doesn't have to, and his mouth trembles with something that doesn't quite want to be a smile yet. "I didn't hate my parents either," she admits, narrowing her eyes at him and _knowing_ that he knows, despite the way he still won't look at her. "I still don't."

Now he does look at her, and she thinks his confusion might be even more heartbreaking than his desperation. She can almost see the wheels turning in his mind as he tries to reconcile too many admitted loves and unspoken hatreds. "But they _sold you_. Mine ..."

And, _oh_ , she realises as he trails off, _but not to me_ falling into an entirely different place in her mind, the difference between us he sees is in _deserving_. "It's okay," she says, even though neither of them have been okay for a very long time. "You get there, eventually."

It's easier than saying _you're not nothing to me, either_ , but maybe it means the same thing. Maybe he knows that already. Maybe they'll walk there together, through muddled knots of disappointment and anger and hope and love that were never as linear and Jedi and Sith both wanted to believe.

But thinking of the Jedi makes her think of Luke, and of the fear of the dark — of her, of Ben — in his eyes as the rain fell around them like a drowning more final than anything the Force offered. "I'm glad you didn't hate them," she says instead. Without hatred there is _possibility_ , shaped like fine dresses and futures and not at all like Sith helmets and history, and that, almost more than anything, she wants to give him again.

Ben gives a half-shrug. "It was good, sometimes. Some days, like that one ... some days I thought it might be good enough. Those were the ones he didn't want me to remember."

Memories had been all Rey had had on Jakku, whole constellations of them painted across the insides of her eyelids in a mirror of the stars above. They had anchored her within herself as surely as Jakku's constellations had grounded her in the endless deserts. She can't imagine what it must have meant for Ben to lose his memories to that ... creature.

Can't imagine what it means to him now to have them back, to let her see them as well, and she finds to her surprise that she is, for the second time in three days, on the edge of tears herself.

"Do you still think about — I mean, do you want ..." Rey trails off, lost for words, and instead focuses on the memory, the deep green silks of his gifted dress spilling over child Ben's shoulder, silver ink like moonlight streaking the fabric and his skin alike. In the memory he's something _else_ , and though Rey doesn't understand the exact shape of his wanting, the _level_ at which he feels is achingly familiar.

The silence between them is so complete, she thinks for a moment he might not answer her. She wouldn't blame him, knows what she's asking is a costly trade after all he's given already, when her own childhood wants were so indistinguishable from belief that they were hardly wants at all.

"I don't know," he finally says. "She — Amilyn, she made it seem like something easy to want, to ... be. After ..."

This, Rey knows: after was Luke, and training, and absence, and the slow fade until all he remembered how to want was _pain_.

"After that it was easier not to want. I haven't thought about it in a very long time," he admits tentatively, like he's not quite sure he's hoping he'll get to think about it again.

Rey studies the space on the console where their hands aren't quite touching, unsure how to respond. _You could_ , she wants to say, or maybe, _I would let you_ , except where they're going there's so many more people than just the two of them. Three of them, Amilyn silent but so utterly there.

"It was a good colour for you," she says instead. "The green. I ... I liked it." It feels oddly hard to say, even after everything, but the smile that flickers across his face, there-and-gone and maybe only in the Force, makes her glad she did. "There weren't that many colours on Jakku."

Ben swallows hard, moves his hand a centimetre closer to hers. "Tell me about the ones there were."

"They were ..." Something you never used words for, she thinks. What need was there to separate the burning sand from the bright endless sky when they both meant _alone_? But like so much else now, perhaps they could be more.

She takes his hand, takes a breath. "Help me decide."


	8. Chapter 8

Together we can take a piece of never  
Bring it back with us  
And make this world our home  
— Xandria, "Our Neverworld"

Rey doesn't remember the day, at first. Most of the days on Jakku were all the same, planned so meticulously by the routine that kept her moving, kept her _alive_ , that they compressed easily into nothing more than a single tally stroke against the wall.

But the days that were good, or bad — those she tried to keep things from, tiny and bright and hers, a map from the day she was left to the day she could leave.

When she realises where they are, in the middle of the jagged string of rocks that stretch towards the horizon, studded with colourful bits of glass not yet worn away by the wind and sands, Rey grins. This, this must have one of the good days.

Her smile fades quicker than twilight though when she thinks about what this place would mean for Ben. Her fault, possibly, for thinking too much about their last conversation, or maybe they have less control over these memories than she'd thought.

"This is the Observatory," he says, and doesn't wait for her answering nod before sighing and shaking his head ruefully. "All this history under your hands for so long, and you knew nothing about it."

"Not nothing," she corrects, scanning the rocks for her child-self, one hand raised against the setting sun. "Just not anything I wanted to bring away with me."

Ben snorts in disapproval and starts picking his way down the ridge, running his fingers along the bits of glass with as much reverence as he had once shown his new dress.

"Careful!" Rey calls, the memory of too many cuts and scrapes from her past climbs blooming anew across her hands. Maybe they can't be bloodied or bruised, in these half-substantial places, but she sees behind his caution the urge to reach out and _hurt_ , and it makes her ache in ways she doesn't know how to name.

"I'm always careful with this," he says absently, brushing bits of sand out of a carved depression in the rock face.

Rey opens her mouth to reply, unsure if he's being deliberately obtuse, but the shift in his voice, his body, even his Force signature now that he's caught on a new puzzle, makes her reconsider. Before she can decide what to say, though, her attention is caught by a noise behind her, and she spins around to see a flash of metal in the sunlight before a child's head pops up from the sand.

"Oh, _no_ ," she says in dismay, her quiet voice nevertheless carried to Rey by the wind. "This isn't where we came in, Captain."

Memory comes rushing back to Rey all at once at that: of the day she'd gotten so turned around by blocked passages and locked doors that she'd emerged from an exit she'd never seen before, her parked speeder nowhere in sight. Of clutching her doll and waiting for nightfall so she could orient herself with the stars, and having even that hope foiled by a meteor shower that blurred the sky nearly to nothingness before sleep took her.

Of Mashra finding her the next day and walking her back to the speeder, too concerned at the thought that she might have lost her best helper to wonder exactly what Rey had been digging, so far from any ship.

What would she have thought, the child, if she had known that, far in the future, she would be watched over by not only a version of herself who had made it off of Jakku with friends rather than family, but also by one of the most hated men in the galaxy?

Maybe it wouldn't have been unimaginable to the girl at all, whose only knowledge of the Empire was remnants she didn't know how to fear.

"Ben," Rey says. Her voice cracks on the too-quiet word, but he appears nearly instantly at her side anyway, clutching his gloves in one hand. "There." She points to the girl, now sprawled on her back with her pack to one side and her Dosmit Ræh doll clutched in one hand.

His eyes, however, fall immediately on the child's satchel. "What did you take?"

Rey sighs. But she had meant to distract him, from his own memories and from the remembrance that whatever light was held in some of them had been too fleeting and too pale to keep back the fall of years of night.

"Star charts, mostly. There was a map of Jakku, once, some navigational tools ... I didn't know what half of them were. It was only the ... attendants, whoever they were, who would trade me for them."

Ben's lip curls. "Of course the slaver wouldn't know how to treat the real treasures right under his nose," he mutters, but his eyes are on the child, and Rey suddenly isn't sure whether he means her or the relics she had taken from the Observatory.

 _Slaver_. Not even the spacers just passing through had used the word for Unkar, and Rey's blood chills at what sort of experience Ben might be drawing on. "He was in your head, wasn't he?" Ben goes on, apparently taking her wonder for disagreement.

The child Rey is drawing a map in the sand, asking Ræh for confirmation. Rey can't remember if she had been thinking about Unkar at all then, and frowns. Should she have thought about him? Should she remember thinking about him?

"He doesn't matter now," she decides firmly. "We should ... wait here."

Ben raises an eyebrow at the change of subject, and Rey thinks: _no, I gave you an answer_. He's pushed her towards so many unspoken truths today, given her so much in return, and she wants, for now, to let a slightly different truth than the asked-for one lie unchallenged.

"Why here?" he asks. "The Observatory's still buried, aren't you going to —?"

"No," she says quickly. "Not again. Not like the tomb. Maybe that's why the Force brought us here but it isn't what I wanted you to see."

He just looks at her, eyes wide, and she can _feel_ his curiosity burning at him, the desire to delve under sand and stone and face the same darkness of the tomb time and time over to find out something _new_. Can nearly feel it for herself, through their bond. It's a luxury she never had a chance to feel, on her quick dives to grab whatever the attendants had asked for, and it draws a smile from her lips almost despite herself.

Of all the things she had expected from Kylo Ren and Ben Solo alike, the idea that he could make her _smile_ was new.

"Did anyone ever tell you you're a nerd?"

His jaw tightens. "Kindly or unkindly?"

Her eyes widen as, beneath the words, she can hear other whispers, clawing their way up the bond like corpses from the sand. They're faint, Ben's memories made manifest in her own, but unmistakable: Leia's distracted _really Ben? That looks like it's from the Old Republic days_. Han's uninterested _hm, I think Lando and I stole something like that once. Sold_. Amilyn's delighted _oh, I'd never seen that before, tell me more_.

And finally, so cold Rey nearly loses her hold on the Force vision entirely, Snoke: _useless pet_.

"Ben, I'm sorry, I —"

He's not listening to her, though — or rather, he's only listening to her younger self. The child is pacing in circles, eyes fixed on her doll, still trying to come up with a plan for retrieving her speeder. "Okay, Captain, we started by the blue rocks and went North, and if there were eight turns that means ..." Ben moves closer, slowly, kneels and reaches for her satchel, just to see if he could.

The girl flops back down to the ground, and Ben jerks his hand back from her satchel as if he'd been bitten. "Rey of Jakku doesn't get lost, Captain, we'll figure something out." She lifts the doll closer to her mouth, lowers her voice conspiratorially. "One day, Captain, I'll salvage enough locater beacons that we'll have our _own_. Imagine that!"

"Ben," Rey says softly. Twilight was never very long near the Observatory, but the sun still seems to have set unnaturally fast, and in the pinkish-blue dusk her voice seems louder than it should.

He doesn't answer. She takes his wrist loosely in her hand, draws him back to a hollow a little ways from the child. He sits down, legs spread, and looks up in wordless invitation. It's an quicker decision than she had expected to settle into the space he's left. "There's a meteor shower tonight. Watch with me?"

He sighs, brings his hands up to brush tentatively across her waist, and it's answer enough.

It's easier to touch, like this, in these Force-brought things that are not quite memories, not quite visions. Rey isn't sure if they're more or less real than they should be, but it's so hard to think about when Ben is so undeniably _there_ behind her as she leans back into his chest.

He could swallow her whole like a sandstorm, she thinks as his arm settles heavy and warm across her lap, had she not already won him, had the Force not already taken them both.

The child, curled around her doll and chattering softly about legends and history, waits for a morning she is sure will come.

Rey, far more fitful in Ben's arms, wonders if she'll ever dream of an uncomplicated future again.

"Do you think," she asks slowly, as Ræh goes flying through the air with all the freedom of a child's laugh. For a heartbeat of a moment she hangs pinned against the night sky, and Rey sighs, remembering a time when flight had seemed so much simpler.

"Do I think what?" The words are a ghost against her ear, and they nearly set her head to spinning with the reminder that this, too is one of the things they've been walking towards since they locked eyes across his mask in the forest.

Maybe even earlier than that, if their united presence in the Force had followed their younger selves through these moments of their lives.

"Do you think it will ever be like this again?" The first shooting star streaks across the sky.

Four stars later, when the sky is fully dark, he says into the quiet, "I hope so. I hope we'll find out."

Neither of them notice when the sky finally fades.


	9. Chapter 9

I want to be a healer, and love all things that grow and are not barren.  
— Eowyn, in J.R.R. Tolkien's _The Return of the King_

"Rey," he says, and she starts at the sound of her name. Chewie had sent them both back to try to get some rest, improbable as that seemed, taking his turn to make sure none of the expanding debris fields did much more damage to the Falcon. For Rey, rest had meant little more than shutting her eyes and counting her breaths, still too anxiously quick like during Jakku sandstorms.

"Are you okay?" She recognises, faintly, the absurdity of the question as she rubs her eyes, but in some part beyond words she thinks: _he knows what I mean_. She's never been so unguarded around someone before. Never _wanted_ to be.

But he's off his guard too, even as his whole face seems to crumple in on itself as if he could keep all the bad out by will alone. "Amilyn," he says, and Rey hears the space before her name now, the space where the memory of _auntie_ lives.

"Is she ...?" Rey would know, she thinks, if Amilyn had died during the short while she was failing to sleep, but if Rey has learned one thing the past few days it is that there is so much _else_ than death.

"I don't know." The pain in his eyes, gone so briefly in some of the memories they had walked through together, is back, and Rey can't help but reach out and rest her fingertips at the corner of his eyes, try to soothe the reminders of grief.

He reaches up, tentatively, like he can't believe she's touched him, that she's allowing him to touch her in return, and she feels the warmth of his hand enveloping hers. Pressing her hand into his skin like he could burn her fingerprints there if only they were a little warmer.

It's a touch she wants to drown in, but he had woken her for a reason and she can feel the shape of the question he can't quite figure out how to ask. "Do you want me to ... I mean, I don't know what else I can do for her, but ..."

The _Falcon_ didn't have much in the way of medical supplies, mostly just the few bacta patches that the Resistance could spare, and most of those they had already fitted over the deepest of Amilyn's wounds. She'd stopped bleeding hours ago, but hadn't woken up. Rey wonders, silently, if she's _ever_ going to wake up — she knows well from the few spacers that came through Niima that hyperspace was a desert hungrier than anything on Jakku.

Then again, the Amilyn of Ben's memories didn't seem much like the sort of person who would come back from hyperspace anything but luminous, and more complete than before.

He doesn't say anything in response, just looks up at her with those wide, desperate eyes. Rey sighs, kicks her thin blanket to the foot of her bunk, and gets up. She doesn't need to look behind her to know that Ben's trailing behind her like something lost through the cramped quarters.

Amilyn looks much the same as she did when they'd laid her on the bunk, bloodlessly pale and half-present. Less in danger of physically falling apart, Rey thinks as she kneels down and draws back the pile of blankets swaddling Amilyn's body to see that the bacta patches, at least, had been doing their job. She doesn't quite think she'll ever be used to them, overpriced luxury that they were on Jakku, but as she carefully opens Amilyn's right eyelid and watches her pupil contract at the light, she's unspeakably grateful for them.

 _Please don't die_ , she thinks, as if there were any possibility Amilyn could hear her thoughts. _Please, he couldn't bear it_.

 _Please_ , she doesn't quite think, remembering the Amilyn of Ben's youth, _please, I would quite like to meet you too_.

There's no answer, of course, but for a moment Rey thinks Amilyn looks just a little brighter; when she closes her fingers gently around Amilyn's wrist, she thinks maybe she feels a little bit warmer, a little closer to life.

Amilyn's heartbeat is a thready, stubborn thing echoing under Rey's grip, through the Force where she can feel her almost without trying. "She's holding on," she says, but she knows he hears the unspoken second half of the sentence: _but Crait is still so very far_.

"I can't heal her," he says, eyes shining with tears. Somehow, even though they're both on their knees, he still manages to be looking _up_ at her. "Please, Rey."

And she _wants_ to, more than anything she wants to give some sort of life to the too-pale woman under her hands, the woman whose daring split a dreadnought in two and whose love once made Ben smile like a sun. Wants to prove to Ben that he didn't make a mistake, coming with her.

"I only knew Luke for three days," she says helplessly. In the Force, Amilyn's life is a shallow, slippery thing, one Rey fears she'll crush if she holds on too tightly. Ships she knows inside and out, dead or alive, and they repay her knowledge with trust, leaping to respond to her desires in a way that most of the people she's known have called _uncanny_. People ... "He barely taught me what the Force was, much less how to heal someone with it."

"It's like fixing any other machine," he says as if he knows exactly what she's thinking, and Rey would be offended at the comparison if he wasn't so clearly desperate. His knuckles are stark white against the dark purple and blood of the remnants of Amilyn's dress. "I can show you, but you have to _do_ it. The light ... it's too far away."

He's crying now, frustration and exhaustion spilling over his cheeks. There's a world of vulnerability in each tear, Rey thinks, but where once she would have hated him for making her see it, now she thinks only of how she can repay the trust he's put in her by allowing her to see this.

How can she repay him, when all she seems to ever do is demand his trust again and again as they walk further into the unknown? There is, perhaps, only one way to try.

"Okay," she says, wrapping the fingers of her free hand around his wrist. He's hardly warmer than Amilyn, she realises, and the enormity of what they've done suddenly hits her all at once.

_Everything has changed and I do not know how to make it better. Oh, bone and stars, what have I done?_

She takes one breath, then another, tries to anchor herself between the shifting sands of Ben's and Amilyn's Force energies swirling around her. "You said I needed a teacher, Ben. Calm down. Show me."

Rey grips his wrist so hard that for a fleeting moment she wonders if his skin would bruise. When she turns to him, Ben meets her gaze with a look of such surprise that it almost physically knocks her backwards.

"You remembered," he says in a wonder so profound it's nearly indistinguishable from disbelief.

"Hard to forget." Despite the gravity of the moment, she manages a smile. "It means something else now, though, doesn't it?"

He places his other hand over hers where it rests on Amilyn's. They _fit_ , like that, so perfectly that Rey isn't surprised by it anymore. And he, too, feels warmer like this, like maybe practise makes it easier.

"I think it can," he says softly. A secret just for her, even though Amilyn isn't awake to hear it.

"Show me, then," she repeats, looking down to where their hands seem to be holding Amilyn’s life under her skin by will alone. Maybe they are, Rey thinks. After all, what was the Force but the will to live, to survive, to _persist_ through and from death and space alike, to be anything more than the shallow stardust shell that she fears Amilyn is slipping towards heedless of bacta patches and stitched-up skin.

If she knows nothing else about the Force she knows that it _wants_.

"You can feel her, can't you? In the Force."

Rey nods. If she shuts her eyes she can see the twist of glittering light in Amilyn's space on the bed, the same indefinable essence that isn't quite a Force signature like Luke had taught her but isn't quite anything else, either. "She’s here," she says. "Shining brighter than — oh, Ben, she _wants_ to stay."

That, more than anything, feels important; that, more than anything, she wants him to know.

_Not alone. Not again, not ever._

He's silent for a very long moment, so quiet that she would wonder if he'd left if she couldn't see him right beside her in the Force, feel the rise of his veins and bones in the smooth skin of his wrist under her fingers, sense the _presence_ of his body so close to hers on the _Falcon_ 's floor. "You have to find the li — find the parts that are wrong." His voice sounds hollow, far away.

 _Find the light_ , he'd nearly said, and even as Rey feels her senses expand with the Force's power spreading through her, she shudders at the thought of what healing must have done to him in the past.

"I —" Her brow furrows as she lets herself sink deeper into the Force, lets her awareness slide along Amilyn's presence in the Force. _Life, life, life_ , she thinks, counting her own heartbeats to keep her grounded. "She doesn't feel wrong at all."

"Then you're not doing it right," he snaps, and Rey resists the urge to pull away. "If nothing's wrong then why isn't she waking up?"

"I don't know," she mutters, willing herself not to give into the same irritation. The question's a fair one, but it doesn't mean she has the answers he wants or deserves. “I can't fix every —"

And then she does feel it.

It's a rush of power, of _clarity_ unlike anything she's ever felt, even on Ahch-To. In the material world, Ben twists his wrist just enough that he can press their palms together and lace his fingers through hers. In the Force, she hits a wall and falls through, _into_ it, subsumes the bricks whole and looks out through the gaps.

It's him, it's Ben, lending all the raw power roiling through his veins to her like a promise, a plea — _not like this not like this fix her fix her fix he_ — until it's no longer Ben guiding her Force senses but the two of them, something whole and new that _feels_ and _works_ and —

Balance.

This is what they are, what has been inevitable ever since they first touched hands across a fire that hadn't leeched the cold of the caves from Rey's bones or the chill of a starship from Ben's but had instead built them both up higher into a new flame.

"Together."

She doesn't realise she's spoken aloud until he says, "Yes. The power of the Living Force isn't only the power of the dark side. You think healing doesn't take _power_?"

She had frightened Luke with her power, frightened him so badly he ran away. And Ben had kept coming back.

"Show me," Rey says, confidently this time. "I need to know what I'm looking for."

Slowly, she lets her senses expand once again, and it feels _right_ in a way that it hadn't the first time. Calmer, despite the fact that she's drawing on Ben's power, his Force sensitivity too now. She had expected him to be angrier, she thinks, but there's just a quiet, resigned sort of sadness.

"There," he says, and the part of her that's still aware of her physical form dimly knows that he's brought their joined hands up to point at something they can only see in the Force. "She's bleeding."

With his support she can see it now, too: a gash running from the crown of Amilyn's head to her groin, unlike any of the cuts on her body, like something had tried to slice her in two.

Like the earth in the forest. Like the _Supremacy_.

Stars, had _Amilyn_ — ?

But Rey puts the thought aside because now that she can see the cut she can also see the bleeding, wisps of burned-away life spilling from her like water through cupped hands, something too precious to hold.

"You have to put it back," Ben says, and she can hear the frown in his voice, like he knows he's not saying it quite right. "Remind her that — that she's here, in _this_ moment, and not ..."

Rey bites her lip, concentrates, imagines shaping the essence of the Force around her into a hand. It's a ghostly, misshapen thing, but as soon as she can see its outline in the Force she guides it to the shape of Amilyn's body, raises it ineffectually in an attempt to block the tendrils of life.

They slip through the hand, too, equal bits of nothing in the Force. Maybe the hand isn't there at all, just a hopeful imagining of her own power over the Force.

At her side, Ben makes a small, choked sound that might have been a sob.

"How does it stop, Ben?" she asks, desperation leaking into her voice despite her efforts. "I see it, I promise, but I don't know — I'm not trained, I _can't_ —"

"You can," he insists, but it sounds more like belief than an order, and it gives Rey the strength to try again.

The will is there, she thinks, star-bright _want_ pulsing in time in each of their three hearts. Three of them, against the infinite multiplicity and presence of the Force.

_Focus, Rey._

"You can't have her," she says, and hopes Ben knows she isn't talking to him. "We're not going to stop, you know. When we've both decided we want the same thing —" and it's a thrill that she never would have expected, to know that someone wants the same thing as her, is brave enough to want something _with_ her, "— you can't stop us."

Ben's pulse throbs against her wrist, in time with her own. Is there less life spiralling away now?

"We're balanced now. We're ..." her mouth twists in a rueful grin, "learning, at least. And it means ..."

She doesn't know _what_ it means for the Force, except that Luke had thought it necessary. But what it means for Amilyn ...

Struck by a sudden thought, she sends her heightened awareness outwards, past the _Falcon_ 's bulkheads, past debris and void and atmosphere and salt and rock and the dull sparks of light of each Resistance member that is just life and nothing more — and, bone and stars are there ever too few of them — until she finds what she's looking for.

Leia, unmoored and so dull Rey might not have recognised her had she not been looking specifically for her. Time and loss has filed away some of the vibrancy that clung to the Leia of Ben’s memories, has cut too close to the sharp life of the General Rey met only weeks ago and threatened to tear that away too. But she's there, alive but ...

"Not balanced," Rey says. Not like she was with Amilyn. She imagines the awful gash down Amilyn's body closing, repairing itself with all the strength of life that wants to _remain_ life, like the cave plants on Jakku that persisted in trying to spread, to _survive_ outside. She'd helped those come to life, too, red flowers against red sand like they _needed_ to be there. "Please."

She's not sure she's talking to the Force anymore, isn't, really, sure she _wants_ the Force to answer, any more than she wanted a sand dune or the ocean to answer her. But she feels Ben press closer, feels, through their bond, something like hope flutter against the cage of anguished apathy he'd built so carefully, and knows that, even just for that, all this was worthwhile.

And then Amilyn blinks. Rey feels it more than sees it, a shudder like Amilyn's entire presence in the force has been re-set, and then there's a brief flash of pressure as Amilyn squeezes her hand.

Rey opens her eyes with a gasp, slumping against Ben's side even as he keels forwards against the bed.

"You did it," Ben says in awe, voice muffled from the way his forehead is pressed into the mattress.

"Yeah," Rey says, breathing heavily. "I remembered ... I don't think that's the first time I've healed someone. I'm not even sure it's the first time you've helped."

Ben jerks up, sits back on his heels. "What do you mean?"

Rey smiles, a real smile as she looks down to where their clasped hands still rest on his thigh. "I'll show you."


	10. Chapter 10

Idol of roses, iconic soul.  
I know your name.  
— Lana Del Rey, "Bel Air"

Jakku had never been only desert. Hidden in the scars that eons had left on its surface, desert plants struggled with the sun for life, sent their roots down past dirt and rock to the concentrated essence of _life_  that circled round the planet's core. You could walk hours in the desert and be almost unthinkably lucky to see just one of the bright red desert stars, or a pale green cactus bleached nearly to white by the unforgiving sky.

Or, Rey thinks, as the sands once more rise around them out of the blue of the Force, you could know where to search, and have more life — and kinder life — than could ever be found at Niima.

"A cave?" Ben asks, a sliver of doubt creeping into his tone.

Rey sighs, thinks back over her last words. "Okay. Healed _something,_ I suppose. Plants, humans ... it's still life, isn't it? And I couldn't have — I didn't realise, until then, but it was you. I felt the Force, and ..." She doesn't have the words for it, not now, realising for the first time that the life she had felt in the caves must have been connected to the Force, the energy sprung from something other than just the novelty of new stubborn life.

He's looking at her curiously again, like he's back to trying to figure out a particularly compelling puzzle. "I still don't understand how could I help you. I didn't even know you."

"Fate, remember?" she smiles slightly. Teasing him feels far more comfortable now than it had on Chandrila, the hours — in the cockpit, in memories — like a place out of time, something that's let their relationship twist in a way that seems both wholly new and entirely inevitable.

When he smiles back, it feels like a victory. "You don't believe that," he says, but there's no malice in the words, just a statement of fact.

Rey gives a half-shrug, wondering, as she does so, just how much of Ben's body language is rubbing off on her. She has never been more aware of her body language than she is with Ben; the need to pay more attention to her limbs than was necessary to keep from losing them to a still active bit of machinery is something new. "I believe it more than I did a day ago," she admits. She holds out her hand before she can think too much about the implications of the gesture. "Come on. She's waiting for us inside."

He doesn't so much take her hand as place his own gently over it, hovering so close that the leather of his glove brushes her hand as they walk. She's tempted to take his hand anyway — hadn't they been closer, watching the meteor shower? Now that she knows how that feels, to have Ben not only at her side but _with_  her in nearly every way that mattered, the lack of contact feels strange — but lets him be for the moment. He will come to her in his own time, this she believes.

After all, he had taken her hand the one time it _mattered_. He will again.

Rey hears her younger self before she sees her, keeping up a running commentary of the cave system somewhere in the darkness ahead. Her voice is less childish now, and Rey suspects when they catch up to her she won't have her doll, but Rey also knows she feared losing herself to silence long past the time she carried Dosmit Ræh in physical form everywhere she went.

Ræh was her first copilot, and Rey takes a small moment to be thankful for her presence. To wonder how many Resistance soldiers joined her in the Force today.

"The doll, again?" Ben asks, clearly having heard the same thing.

Rey thinks about snapping something about Ben's obsession with the thing, but thinks better of it. Nods sharply and just continues following her own voice down the tunnel.

The teenager, when they find her, is sitting cross-legged in the middle of a cavern, surrounded by red and purple succulents that pulse dimly with the beat of Jakku's dead heart.

"One day," she's saying, eyes fixed on the desert star cupped in her palms, "there'll be whole planets full of you. Jakku, of course. Maybe there's others. Maybe my parents will take me there, once they come back."

Rey's seized with the urge to reach out, to tell her younger self that that's not what she's going to get at all, she's going to get something better than she could imagine, and more people too — but she can't, and it breaks her heart all over again, another break of a heart-bone not yet healed from the throne room.

She can feel the expected derision through the bond from Ben, but underneath it, an undercurrent of sadness deeper than she'd felt from him before, even when they had watched him as a child.

"Life," he says softly. "On Jakku."

"Yeah," Rey says, searching his eyes for some hint of what could have prompted that observation. "You knew, in the tombs. When you talked about history. Jakku used to be green, used to be ... a different kind of life, I think. Nothing leaves Jakku for real."

Not even the trees, she isn't sure she wants to say. Not even me.

"An echo?" He tilts his head, considering, and Rey shivers as his voice overlaps with her younger self's fond murmur of _Echo_ with melodic precision as she sets the named plant back down in a patch of sand.

Ben kneels as the memory stands, reaches insubstantial hands out to the desert star. Rey watches him close his eyes right before his fingers pass easily through the bright red petals, leaving nothing but a faint haze like glittering shrapnel in their wake.

Rey steps closer, rests her hand on his shoulder. She's selfishly glad he's kneeling, isn't sure she can or wants to bear the hurt on his face that she can imagine clearer than she'd ever thought she would. Hardly a week since she's met him, less since she's stopped hating him, and she already feels she knows every possible expression that could cross his face.

"You? Hate?" Ben asks disbelievingly. He isn't looking up at her, is still facing out to the rest of the cave where the teenager drifts from plant to plant, stopping to rearrange leaves or tip a few precious drops from her waterskin onto a particularly withered-seeming plant. She isn't sure if she'd spoken aloud or if he's just picking up on something — the energy of the cave, the ever-deeper closeness that healing Amilyn together had wrought, something else entirely — and though she knows she should close herself off again in response it's the last thing she wants to do.

Her fingers tighten on his shoulder, digging into the thick padded cloth of his tunic. She wants to feel skin, some outward extra proof that he really is hers. Insurance on the loan of his loyalty, the part of her that will never not be a scavenger thinks, and Rey flushes hot with shame she isn't sure she deserves.

 _I never hated my parents. I didn't hate my father_. "It's a hard thing to hold onto," she says, and she's not sure whether it comes out more like a justification or an apology. "Harder to define. I knew you before I met you and when I did you were —"

"That's not what I meant," he says sharply, and out of the corner of her eye Rey catches the flicker of her younger self carefully plucking a nightbloomer and placing it behind her ear. "You were afraid of me. You were angry with me. You ..." And now he does turn to her, as Rey's teenage ghost begins to hum softly, and the wounded gratitude in his eyes takes her breath away. "You _felt_ for me, and it wasn't out of obligation."

Rey reaches down to wrap trembling fingers around his shaking hand. She can feel something growing in the bond between them, knows, by Ben's wide shining eyes and the way his mouth works around images he still doesn't know how to bring to life, that he feels it too. That part of him knows part of him was _here_ , on Jakku, Snoke's carefully drawn box around the elements of the Force he was allowed to touch shattered for even just a moment.

In memory, Rey walks over to them with a wilted spinebarrel in her hands, "You weren't supposed to last very long," she says to it, and there's another presence, not quite another voice, all tangled up with hers. Rey watches her younger self glance around curiously, shiver when she finds nothing. "It's okay. Neither was I."

"We did, though," Rey says quietly, crouching down so she can be at eye level with Ben. "We made it through. Together, then and now, because it matters — it matters more what you _do_ with the fear, the anger. The past is gone but it can't die. It's always going to be part of the future."

The tears finally spill out over his cheeks, and Rey catches one in her free hand like a promise.

"But for now," the younger Rey says, and she's just speaking to the plants, Rey _knows_ she is, _remembers_ that she was, but she still picks up so effortlessly from where Rey left off that she means all that and more. She sets the plant on the cave floor and carefully arranges each of its roots into a crevice in the stones as Rey turns Be's hand around and interlaces their fingers. "It's time for you to grow."

The weight of the Force she puts behind the words is strong enough to throw both of them from the memory.


	11. Chapter 11

Our compass will reveal the place where "us" is real  
Sailing the sea where our legend will live  
All our stories and memories are mine to believe  
Walking there, hand in hand  
— Visions of Atlantis, "Return to Lemuria"

The cave has wrought a silence in Ben more complete than any other vision. He sits curled in the copilot's seat, resting his cheek on his knees and pretending to stare past her out at the stars, and she lets him have his masquerade, for now. He'll talk when he's ready, or he won't.

When he does speak, it's to ask a question. "How often did you talk to yourself?" The words are neutral enough, but his eyes are haunted, and she considers her words with a care unique to Ben that she's finding comes easier with time.

"Every day," she says, as matter of fact as she can make it. "You had to, in the desert. Else you'd hear the voices in the wind, follow them out to the Dead Sea and never be seen again. If there was something ... even if it was just your voice, that was something different."

Ben turns away again, buries his face in his knees and mutters something that sounds suspiciously like _alone_. Rey's growing to hate the word, not because of what it means, but because of how imperfectly useless it is, especially in the face of the bond. No matter how many stars between them, there will never be silence there again.

But Amilyn had fallen through a hole in the stars and come back all veiled by sunlight, and Rey thinks for one wild moment that if she just reaches out _right_ , runs her fingers along the seams of time and finds the right weak spot, she could pull Ben down with her into a future where they won't have to be so angry.

She's not sure at all that's what they'll find on Crait.

"And it was different?" he asks tentatively. Uncertain, like the question is fuelled by a yearning so deep he isn't sure quite how to put it into words.

Rey wants to say _yes, my words were never the song of the winds, they would never fit that melody_ , or maybe she wants to say, _no, there were days when the voices were so compelling and so close to mine I thought I would be stranded on the flats forever, so I had to climb down to where the plants and ghosts still lived and let them breathe instead_.

Wants to say whatever will lay the path for him to come back with her into the soothing grey, if not the blinding light.

How can she explain that they were all truths, where sand and sky were both eternal, and all lies, where stone and plant cocooned her in single fleeting moments?

What she settles on is, "I think they were different enough. And it got easier, with time. Finding the Observatory, the attendants..." She trails off, suddenly uncomfortably aware that she's just listing off things Ben had never had, solutions to a loneliness so different than the one that had been his constant companion.

But not anymore, she vows silently — to herself, to the Force. To Ben, if he could pick up the thought from her whole being as easily as he had plucked apart the buried memories she couldn't even remember giving him. He'll not ever have to be alone in the middle of a galaxy that only ever wanted pieces of him again, and she'll never again have to content herself with the voice and love of the inhuman.

Something new, they had been circling around, but she thinks maybe the more important part is something complete, absences all cancelled out until together they could be _everything_.

"Why do you think I couldn't feel you like that?" The words spill out of him all in a rush, jolting Rey from her contemplation of the future. "I was strong, I trained, I knew — I thought I knew how to touch —"

He falls silent, swallowing the _everything_ that had threatened to burst from him, turns his attention instead to picking at the hole a Praetorian lightsabre had torn in his trousers.

Rey is almost positive they both know the answer to that is _Snoke_ , just as sure as she knows that's a realisation that Ben will have to come to and speak in his own time.

Fourteen years she had waited to speak the truth of her parents, with his help. How long until he's able to parse the list of Snoke's crimes without losing himself to the dark all over again?

"Really, never?" is all she says. It's an unsettling thought — the idea that something that had been so fundamental to her understanding of the power she knew now as the Force could also be something that Snoke had simply prevented Ben from knowing about, or feeling, or ...

The thought of someone like Snoke interfering with their bond makes her feel almost physically ill, even worse than she'd felt when she first noticed its new stronger presence on Ahch-To. If Snoke knew about it — if he had strengthened it, tried to twist it into something darker than she'd ever felt in the Sith tombs —

But, _no_ , she thinks, _this is ours now_.

She considers Ben again. He's frowning, and she drops her eyes to his thigh as he grips a piece of thread between thumb and forefinger and pulls. He keeps his eyes on the steadily fraying fabric when he says, "Maybe. When I was younger, at the Academy ... Skywalker said it was nothing. A sign I was letting my power run away with me." 

Anger flares up in Rey once more. Luke Skywalker, legendary Jedi, had turned into Luke Skywalker, failed teacher, and for what? No doubt she knew far less than he did about the Force, but Ben was with her, not him, and that had to count for something.

"He was scared of me," she admits quietly. "I reminded him too much of you. Do you think he knew?"

Ben's mouth twists in unamused resignation. "Knew what? That you were powerful? That you had made a peace with the dark side that he never could? That you were the only thing like me in the whole galaxy? That there was a possibility that _Snoke was in your head?_ " She flinches at the venom in his tone, the way energy seems to lash out around him in the Force, coiled hurricane-whips of something much closer to anguish than anger than Ben would admit. But his body is taut and nearly motionless, arms wrapped around his knees as he rocks back and forth almost imperceptibly.

 _He failed you too_ , every word of his says, and Rey isn't sure which of Luke's failures he's more upset about in that moment.

"I took some of the books," she says. "From Ahch-To. We could train together, without Luke." _Be something new_.

He looks up, face gone slack with a mixture of suspicion and joy and something she can't name, even with the bond still open between them. "As if the Jedi would take either of us."

"Sand take them," Rey snaps. "This is for us. Training each other, together."

"You ..." He reaches out, grips her hand where it's resting on her knee. "If you mean that, you should see what Jedi training was really like."

Rey sucks in a breath through her teeth. The last she had seen of Ben's time at the Academy ... but no. This was about learning how to write a different story. "Okay," she says quietly, and tries not to feel the worry in his eyes as the Force swells around them as sharply as she does.


	12. Chapter 12

She had been innocent once, a little girl playing with feathers on the floor of a devil's lair. She wasn't innocent now, but she didn't know what to do about it. This was her life: magic and shame and secrets and teeth and a deep, nagging hollow at the center of herself where something was most certainly missing.  
— On Karou, in Laini Taylor's _Daughter of Smoke and Bone_

When her vision clears again, it is to another forest, trees spiraling so high it makes her dizzy to try to see the tops. She thinks, for a moment, they might be back on Chandrila, but as soon as the thought surfaces it's drowned again in the age of the land around her, far older, and far lonelier than the moment Ben had shown her earlier.

There's a low, resonant hum from somewhere close by, like the noise of a lightsaber gone sideways that sets Rey's teeth on edge. "What's —?" She starts, but Ben is already walking, and she has no choice but to follow.

The source of the noise turns out to be Ben, or, at least, the memory of Ben as a teenager — padawan braid flying over his shoulder as he uses the Force to make saber spin for a crowd of younglings.

Rey can't stifle a gasp. It's Ben's saber, the crossguard unmistakable, but it's a light purple tinged with blue, playful rather than lethal in its not quite contained power.

"This was before," Ben says, as the saber continues to flip, as his younger self picks up one of the younglings to perch on his hip like he had once perched on Amilyn's. Before Rey can say anything, though, the scene blurs and shifts, Ben's control over his memory more nuanced than hers.

The forest resolves again into devastation. Ben is alone, his saber red and vibrating with a mind of its own. As they watch, other figures begin to emerge from the trees around him, some older, some younger. Far too few to be a whole Academy.

The teenager flicks off his lightsaber, pulls one of the younglings into his arms and buries his face in their hair.

"And this was after," Ben says grimly. "Don't you see? We're still in the after, Rey, even if we start again. We'll always be after this attempt at training."

"So we turn it around," Rey says, lifting a hand to touch his cheek but dropping it when he turns away. "We make this before. We make something new."

"No —" Ben starts, but whatever he had planned is washed away by the Force.


	13. Chapter 13

What I know for sure is the heart  
is like the sea with its dark urging:  
wide over everything, breathless and breaking.  
— Remica Bingham-Risher, "We Awaken Near the Ocean After Being Married," _Starlight & Error_

"We'll be landing soon."

"I know." Rey doesn't open her eyes, reluctant to leave the half-meditation. She had just meant to check in on the ship, to send her mind outwards to trace the wires and seams and pure electrical _life_ that made up their strange sanctuary, but the peace of the Force, lighter than on Ahch-To but already more balanced, had been too compelling.

A whole universe at her fingertips with the Force, and still none of it compares to even the _memory_ of Ben's hand, trembling but warm flesh and blood solid in hers.

Everything is going to change when the _Falcon_ 's doors open, even more than it changed in Snoke's throne room. When the doors open they will have to step outside, and face the rest of the Resistance, and then —

— and then they will never be alone again, will never be able to run again, not without breaking more than she, at least, could ever bear to. More than she thinks Ben would be able to survive.

"Do you think they'll kill me?" Now Rey does open her eyes to find Ben looking straight ahead, even though the sun on Crait's blistering-white ground washes out everything in sight, should, by rights, be too painful to look at. Maybe once they've landed that will change, too: maybe he'll no longer feel the need to keep walking facefirst into things that hurt.

"Don't be stupid," she says, but there's no real malice there. "Leia wants you home."

Leia had sent Han to bring Kylo Ren home, once, and then had sent her to bring Luke Skywalker home. Ben is neither of those men, for all he carries the hopes and scars and memories of them both, but Rey knows, hidden somewhere even Kylo hadn't seen when he found the truth of her parents, that you never stop waiting for family.

And she knows, maybe even better than Ben, that neither Leia nor Kylo had ever truly stopped waiting.

Ben smiles, thin-lipped and sad, an expression that Rey wants to be brave enough to kiss off his mouth. "She'll have me home, and the Resistance will have me dead. I knew —"

"I won't let them," Rey promises fiercely, gripping his thigh. "Ben, look at me."

He does. He always does, when she asks, and it would feel like power if it wasn't so sad.

"Listen to me, Ben. You killed Snoke. You saved Amilyn. You came _back_. And if they can't see that ..."

If the Resistance couldn't see that, if they set it against the things he'd done when alone with nothing but a voice in his head and murderers all around him, then he would still be free.

"If they can't see that, then I still won't leave," she declares. "You're not alone. You never will be again."

The disbelief writ plain on his face twists her heart. "You mean it," he says in wonder, and for all that it's not quite a question, it's clear he's still expecting the catch, the half-spoken ever-present _but_ that used to shape all the rewards Snoke would hold over his head, all the _maybe next time, Ben_ s that were Leia's answers to her child's questions too many times to count.

Rey knows promises. Knows what they look like broken, knows what people look like when they're about to turn back. "Forever," she says, before she can think of the enormity of the future that implies, more vast than any desert she's ever walked. "It's what I said, it's what I meant."

"That's usually a threat," he says, and underneath his words she can hear the echoes clear as if they were her own memories: Leia's worried _Ben, you can't do that again, I mean it, you scared me and Amilyn_ ; the more dangerous _bring one of the Knights, the pup must be taught that when I give an order I mean for it to be followed_.

They are more than the sum of their histories, but history is remarkably insistent.

"I'm sorry, I —"

"No," he cups her cheek with a surprisingly steady hand, and she can't help but lean into the touch. "Not when you say it, Rey."

 _Not to me_.

How could he have been so wrong and still —

 _Because he wasn't nearly as wrong as I wanted him to be_ , she thinks wryly, impulsively turning to press a kiss to his palm.

"I understand," she says. And she does: she understands him now in a way she never thought she would, an understanding so different from the _knowing_ that settled in the hollows of her bones even before the day she met him. Rey's lips brush the soft skin of his inner wrist as she speaks, and she shivers with the rightness of it.

"Rey," he whispers as her eyes flutter shut.

She almost looks up. She could, easily, it would be only the slightest twist of her neck, the briefest twitch of her eyelids, and she would be staring right into his eyes, closer than either of them have ever been to another person, close enough to —

But in this moment, already so overwhelming, what she thinks must be close to overwhelmingly _perfect_ , moving feels almost impossible. The weight of a hundred thousand possibilities pin them together: His hand on her cheek, her hand on his thigh.

Forever.

"Ben," she replies. The whole galaxy seems to have shrunk without her knowing, until the only thing she can feel is him under her hands, in the Force. The _Falcon_ has faded around her, Crait seems fled as far away as Jakku. There's only Ben a living flame in the Force that refuses to darken.

He dips his head, presses their foreheads together, and they're so impossibly close now that Rey couldn't open her eyes any more than she could in the middle of a sandstorm.

Maybe, she'll think later, maybe neither of them truly initiated the kiss. Maybe it was the Force, or one of the constellations of Ben's many suns, or maybe fate of an entirely different sort, the only possible result for two people pressed as close as they were on a ship whose relationship with gravity was steadily deteriorating the closer they got to the old rebel base.

But in the moment all Rey knows — all she thinks she might ever know again — is that Ben's lips are on hers, his mouth softer than anything that sends such an electric shock of desire has a right to be, and she might never move, might never _breathe_ again if it means he'll kiss her like this again, forever.

Perhaps fortunately for the both of the, the _Falcon_ hits a rough patch of air before she has to make a choice between breathing and kissing. His teeth click painfully against hers and she pulls back just far enough to see blood blooming across his lip. "Sorry," she says breathlessly, and it's so anticlimactic that she almost laughs. "Are you —"

"I'm fine," he says impatiently. "What about _you_?" He rests his fingertips against her lips, lets them ease the sting of his teeth, and she darts her tongue out to flick across them, makes a face at the dull tang of metal and sweat on his fingers.

She regrets it immediately as concern blossoms across his face, slides forward into his lap so she can cup his cheeks in both palms with greater ease. "I'm fine, I promise. Should we try again?"

His smile has the slightest edge of awed disbelief to it, the same stunned look he always gets like he can't imagine how he's allowed to be this close to her, feel so much _for_ her. "Please?" he says, his voice transforming it into just enough of a question that Rey kisses him in answer.

She can feel his hands sliding around her hips, anchoring her in his lap, feel the heat of his body against hers, hear the soft noise he makes against her mouth as she nudges the bond between them open further, lets everything she's feeling flood between them with an intensity to match the greatest of the feelings he's sent her since she first saw him on Ahch-To.

Feels him open to her in turn, the same want, the same curiosity, the same —

"I see I'm interrupting."

They break apart at the quiet voice behind them, Ben standing up so quickly that Rey nearly falls over. Amilyn stands in the doorway, pale and trembling and probably only held up by the way she's clutching Chewie's hand, but awake and alive.

"Aunt Amilyn," Ben says faintly, sounding rather strangled. Rey can feel her cheeks flaming, and her only consolation is that Ben must be both more embarrassed than her, and his paler skin makes his blush all the more obvious.

Ben Solo, _embarrassed_. Under many other circumstances she would delight in it, but the reality of her situation — coming face to face with a Resistance Vice-Admiral with her lips swollen and tunic mussed from kissing someone who was both Kylo Ren and the Admiral's child — well.

Fourteen years on Jakku had driven away much of Rey's capacity for shame, but some things still couldn't be explained without it.

But Amilyn isn't looking at her at all, is instead focussed utterly on Ben, incredulity and love so intense in her Force signature that she practically glows with them in the physical world. "Ben?" she asks, as if she could make it be him and not Kylo sitting in front of her through sheer force of belief. "Are you really coming home?"

Ben looks back and forth between Amilyn and Rey, not meeting either of their eyes, before ducking his head and letting his hair swing forward to cover his face. "She told me to. This time, I — I'm so sorry."

Rey doesn't have to see his face to know he's crying, again, his body so ill-suited to holding all of the things he feels so desperately inside.

Now Amilyn finally looks at Rey, her smile radiant, and, _oh_ , Rey thinks, so this is where Ben got his smile from. "You have some stories to tell, Rey, don't you?"

"We'll, um." Rey bites her lip and tries to subtly adjust her tunic. "We'll be landing in about five minutes, Admiral."

"That's —" Amilyn breaks off with a gasp, clutching her side, and quicker than Rey can blink Ben is at her side, helping her sit, asking Chewie to look for any more bacta patches. Amilyn clutches Ben's wrist, smiling faintly even though Rey could tell she must still be in serious pain. "Knew you weren't gone, little star," she finally says. "No one's ever really gone."

Ben manages a laugh through his tears, and Rey wonders if she should look away, leave the family reunion to the two of them. But Ben holds out a hand to her, even as he says to Amilyn, "You just took that from my mother."

 _My mother_. Rey gets up to kneel next to Ben, places a comforting hand on his back. Easier now, like it was in memory on Jakku. Ben hasn't called Leia his mother since she met him. Maybe the way forward is brighter than she had thought.

Rey takes his hand, laces his fingers with hers. He is hers now, fought and fought for and now by her side for the future to come.

Ben rests his head on her shoulder, breathes like some of the weight of the past has lifted, become something reconciled instead of something to be borne.

Next to them, Amilyn starts to sing, something light and wordless that seems to guide the _Falcon_ to the ground more clearly than the nav computer ever could.

They are home.

**Author's Note:**

> Q1: Why is this so long?  
> A1: I lack anything remotely resembling impulse control.
> 
> Q2: Did you just name all of Gatalenta's suns after various Finnish goddesses?  
> A2: Yes, I support them and they're doing important work.
> 
> Q2.5: Even the one who uses flattery to drown men?  
> A2.5: Yes, especially her. Men are cancelled.
> 
> Q3: So what's Ben's actual gender in this fic?  
> A3: A wavy hand gesture and some vague regret that particular brain goblin was allowed to ask questions, much like mine.
> 
> Q4: What's up with Han in your version of Ben's past?  
> A4: In and out of Leia's life and not minding what she gets up to when he's out (or: I could not have dealt with another character in this epic, but there's no cheating)
> 
> Q5: Are [Kreia](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Darth_Traya) and [Surik](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Meetra_Surik) easter eggs from KOTOR 2?  
> A5: Yes, I am shipper trash. I am sorry, but the parallels are there and they murdered me. Wookipedia links provided so you may suffer as well if you haven't played yet either (spoilers abound!) — though if you do not know/do not want to be spoiled, it's not _really_ necessary to know anything about them to understand the fic, it's more Ben's reaction that's important.
> 
> Q6: Is there going to be a fanmix/playlist of all of these songs somewhere?  
> Q6: Yes! It is [over here for listening](https://playmoss.com/en/kimaracretak/playlist/inside-my-wounded-soul-like-mortal-love), and [on tumblr for reblogging](http://kimaracretak.tumblr.com/post/171574696596/neither-of-them-have-spoken-aloud-since-they-left). It has all the songs used as epigraphs, plus extra songs to replace the book quotes, as well as a prologue/epilogue song.
> 
> Q7: Why is this in FAQ format?  
> A7: Reveals are in ten minutes and I am Stressed(tm)


End file.
